genCAB
III I II (Third Eye Gemini)
Metropolis Records
The sheer volume of material that David Dutton has released since the reactivation of his genCAB project in 2020 is impressive; between EPs, singles and full-lengths, the Philadelphia based industrialist has more than made up for the decade or so where the project was largely inactive. The song oriented style that the project put forward on 2008’s II transMuter seems especially ahead of its time in retrospect, not only in terms of how it approaches grafting complex arrangements of melody to slick, highly-detailed production. Dutton’s efforts to push both his songwriting and studio skills further into new territory have had mixed results, with 2022’s Thoughts Beyond Words being one of the best records of that year, while 2023’s Signature Flaws suffered from a lack of focus if not ideas and creative energy.
III I II (Third Eye Gemini) is a collection of rerecordings drawn from the project’s pre-reactivation material, along with new songs inspired by the process of revisitation. The exercise finds a balance that the preceding LP lacked, with Dutton exploring the electro-industrial sounds that inform the project, without forgoing his ever more complex compositional ideas. Songs like “Appentence” make for excellent examples of his approach; it’s got numerous distinct sections, a chorus and a verse that morph into and out of one another, and Dutton’s own multi-tracked vocals providing something to latch onto amid the every changing musical landscape.
The record is almost proggy in its complexity, but hidden within it and numerous other songs are the basic tools of electro-industrial music; chopped and processed vocal samples, syncopated drum programming that spans four on the floor kicks to breaks (the “Self Image(s)” using both to good effect), with classic quantized synth programming at the center. The contrast between the record’s ambitious structures and its invocation of the familiar is one of its greatest strengths, lending a more straightforward number like “Perish the Thought” dimensionality without compromising its emotional core, and grounding the rapid-fire switchups on “Of Love and Death”.
The danger of a rerecording project, even when spiked with new songs, is that a newer version, no matter how improved in terms of production or performance, can lose the charm of the original. Similarly, sticking too close to the original can call the whole endeavor into question; why bother remaking your own song if you aren’t gonna do something new with it? A back to back listening exercise of these tracks shows how well Dutton walks that line; “DMT” in its original form is a fast moving bit of club fare with busy rhythm programming, while its new incarnation maintains the pace of the original while spreading out the mix, creating space for its melodic vocal hook to really take root in new ways that it couldn’t in the bricked-in original.
One gets the impression that III I II (Third Eye Gemini) is less tinkering with things that are already complete than a way of bringing older songs closer to Dutton’s original vision for them, coloured by his current sensibilities and abilities. In speaking to his past and present in the same breath, it’s a proper vision of David Dutton as a creator, the arc of his vision for genCAB as a project, and the ways both grand and subtle that he executes on it.
