Dinky's 2009 album finds her dedicated again to the principle that populist and experimental impulses work better as partners than in opposition to one another. Things start out with the at-once slick and crumbling "Childish," its distorted rhythm breakdowns and found-sound echoes slipping in and around a layering of house beats and pulses that constantly seem to be resolving themselves first in one direction, and then another. Anemik then explores variations on that pattern but does so in a way that makes much of the alleged creepiness of dubstep seem tame. If
Dinky's music is not darkly atmospheric, per se, it is often massively disorienting, more often than not feeling like being lost not merely in the beat but in the sounds around the experience, where the clatter and fragmented vocals on "Romaniks," and "Rainfallic"'s steady beats but cryptically playful tones and tweaks, keep the ground shifting under the listener's feet. Then there's the sudden interjection of what sound like calls for help in the otherwise apparently euphoric flow of "Ceramik," a disconcerting series of half-yells/half-moans that are thrillingly creepy. Some moments are more straightforward in comparison, a moody rock-as-such that seems to draw on late-'90s trip-hop more than anything else -- "Goldfishes" being a prime example -- but one song looks back to the '90s in spectacular fashion. "Fadik" is actually a reworking of
Mazzy Star's left-field hit "Fade into You," and like all truly great remakes, it takes the original song's virtues and recasts them into the artist's own style, with rhythm breaks, bursts, and interjections careening throughout the soft guitar and vocals.