Clean Bandit – Dust Clears

Alternative name and slogan for the Roomba, anyone?

[Video][Website]
[6.33]Scott Mildenhall: Their last single was one of the best of the year, so this is a little disappointing. The move from the fairly frenetic to the strikingly sparse is presumably deliberate, and as well as presenting that variation “Dust Clears” still sounds and looks like it came from the same band/art collective/thing as “Mozart’s House,” but it’s not half as fun; “interesting” only gets you so far. Clean Bandit have the potential to be very exciting, but this works best only as an extension of a showcase.
[6]

Alfred Soto: A dubstep ease with space, cocktail piano, and a gitano melody make for a beautiful idea to listen to.
[7]

John Seroff: Rigorously mannered electropop that doesn’t want to wake the baby. Pretty but a tad slight.
[6]

Anthony Easton: This is so clean that you could do cocaine off its mirrored surfaces, proven by how he sings (without irony, or with all possible irony) that terribly wonderful line about shifts in the paradigm.
[8]

Iain Mew: Really clever, a bit too clever indeed. For all its pretty string arrangements it gets a bit much like an ineffectual Hot Chip album track, but Noonie Bao’s “I realised that the situation’s going nowhere” cuts straight through enough to save it.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: A breakup song, of sorts, between the robots who’ll go on to sing “The Game of Love” a second later and the girl who sings “if it didn’t hurt so much, you know I’d give you it all” while half-frozen and quantized, performed as glitchy future pop by someone who can’t get out of bed. The idea’s compelling enough on paper, but as a track, I just wish Richard X or Pharrell produced.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Is this “Somebody That I Used to Know” for Disclosure fans? The boy robot’s not very scary, but his voice has a weight to it. (The piano has none. Also, no flavor.) Points for the string figure, an escapee from the screen shrunk to personal size.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: The payoff isn’t all that special, especially when the minimal parts sound so intriguing. Still, those icy bits do enough to make this a good listen.
[6]

Mallory O’Donnell: Classy and energized bit of bubble-step disco rendered anonymous and annoying by the autotune-masquerading-as-vocoder. Did you sincerely not get the memo?
[5]