''One Nation'' is an album by British musical duo

Hype Williams Harold "Hype" Williams (born August 1, 1970) is an American music video and film director, film producer, and screenwriter. Early life Williams was born in Queens. He is of mixed African-American and Honduran descent. He attended Adelphi Univ ...

. It was released on 14 March 2011 through

Hippos in Tanks Hippos in Tanks was a record label founded in 2010 by Barron Machat and Travis Woolsey. The label specialized in electronic music. It was named the best label of 2011 by ''FACT (United Kingdom magazine), FACT''. Following the death of Machat in 2 ...

record label.

Composition

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...

'' describes the record's sound as “all woozy basslines, stuttering tempos and glacial washes of synths that feel like a hollowing out of several narrative strands in pop history." ''Self-Titled Mag'' called ''One Nation'' "as blunted as

hypnagogic pop Hypnagogic pop (abbreviated as h-pop) is pop music, pop or psychedelic music that evokes cultural memory and 1980s nostalgia, nostalgia for the popular entertainment of the past (principally the 1980s). It emerged in the mid to late 2000s as Am ...

gets." ''

Pitchfork A pitchfork or hay fork is an agricultural tool used to pitch loose material, such as hay, straw, manure, or leaves. It has a long handle and usually two to five thin tines designed to efficiently move such materials. The term is also applie ...

'' critic Paul Thompson wrote: "At its best, ''One Nation'' sounds like a beat tape left to crackle for a decade in somebody's garage. ..a spacious, hazy, hip-hop-influenced electronic dub. It has been compared to the works of

Daniel Lopatin Daniel Lopatin (born July 25, 1982), best known as Oneohtrix Point Never or OPN, is an American experimental electronic music producer, composer, singer, and songwriter. His music has utilized tropes from various musical genres and eras, samp ...

Ariel Pink Ariel Marcus Rosenberg ( ; born June 24, 1978), professionally known as Ariel Pink, is an American musician, singer, and songwriter whose work draws heavily from the popular music of the 1960s–1980s. His lo-fi aesthetic and home-recorded al ...

, and

Boards of Canada Boards of Canada are a Scottish electronic music duo consisting of the brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin. Signing first to Skam Records, Skam followed by Warp (record label), Warp Records in the 1990s, they received recognition following th ...

, and has been characterized as drawing influences from

G-funk G-funk, short for gangsta funk, (or funk rap) is a sub-genre of gangsta rap that emerged from the West Coast scene in the early 1990s. The genre is heavily influenced by the synthesizer-heavy 1970s funk sound of Parliament-Funkadelic (aka P-F ...

synthpop Synth-pop (short for synthesizer pop; also called techno-pop; ) is a music genre that first became prominent in the late 1970s and features the synthesizer as the dominant musical instrument. It was prefigured in the 1960s and early 1970s ...

, horror movie soundtracks, classic R&B and

Chicago house Chicago house refers to house music produced during the mid to late 1980s within Chicago. The term is generally used to refer to the original house music of DJs and producers from the area, such as Ron Hardy and Phuture History and origins D ...

. The album also features

spoken word Spoken word is an oral poetic performance art that is based mainly on the poem as well as the performer's aesthetic qualities. It is a 20th-century continuation of an oral tradition, ancient oral artistic tradition that focuses on the aesthetic ...

fragments

Critical reception

Metacritic Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...

, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 70, which indicates "generally favorable reviews", based on 8 reviews. '' Drowned in Sound'' critic Noel Gardner described Hype Williams as "a brace of obnoxious, always-switched-on jokers whose music has actual depth and beauty, as much as their M.O. might try to disguise it." Gardner further commented: "If you had to single out something as being symbolic of 2011, you could do a lot worse than this album." ''

''s Caspar Llewellyn Smith stated: "And while, for some, two spoken-word tracks – Untitled and Untitled (And Your Batty's So Round) – may bring to mind nothing so much as

Baz Luhrmann Mark Anthony "Baz" Luhrmann (born 17 September 1962) is an Australian film director, producer, writer, and actor whose various projects extend from film and television into opera, theatre, music, and the recording industries. He is regarded by ...

Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young", commonly known by the title "Wear Sunscreen", is an essay written as a hypothetical commencement speech by columnist Mary Schmich, originally published in June 1997 in the ''Chicago Tribune ...

, others may find it all strangely addictive." Tim Chester of ''

NME ''New Musical Express'' (''NME'') is a British music, film, gaming and culture website, bimonthly magazine, and brand. Founded as a newspaper in 1952, with the publication being referred to as a "Rock music, rock inkie", the ''NME'' would be ...

'' thought that the record lacks cohesion and "the songwriting spark of

", eventually writing: "Like making a time capsule and filling it full of junk, '‘One Nation's oddball ephemera might seem more intriguing to good citizens of the future than it does to us."

Track listing

# "Ital" – 3:14 # "Untitled" – 2:28 # "William, Shotgun Sprayer" – 4:30 # "Businessline" – 3:37 # "Warlord" – 4:57 # "Dragon Stout" – 1:04 # "Homegrown" – 1:41 # "Your Girl Smells Chung When She Wears Dior" – 2:12 # "Unfaithful" – 1:40 # "Mitsubishi" – 7:48 # "Jah" – 3:17 # "Break4love" – 3:04 # "Untitled (And Your Batty's So Round)" – 4:42

References

External links

* {{Authority control 2011 albums Hype Williams (band) albums Dubtronica albums Hippos in Tanks albums Hypnagogic pop albums