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Deadly Avenger - Deep Red

Reviews

DJ

Damon Baxter (aka Deadly Avenger) has produced the best opening to an album all year. Fact. ‘We Took Pelham’ gallops atcha’. What sounds like a 300-piece orchestra battles ferociously to produce the widest-screen, most ludicrously over the top, spine-tingling maelstrom of pulse quickening film noir heard for over a decade. Messrs Williams and Barry better start looking for another job.
Remarkably, ‘Deep Red’ just gets better. There’s an Englishman on the prowl ready to snatch DJ Shadow’s hip hop noir crown. Grinding, gritty blaxploitation pimp funk appears on ‘Punisher’, and dirty late-night disco shimmers on ‘Day One’. More reflective moods are explored manfully as well, making ‘Deep Red’ a truly astonishing and accomplished debut that will be talked about in hushed tones for a long time to come. 4.5 / 5

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Underground releases on DJ and his own Illicit label have hinted at musicologist Damon ‘Deadly Avenger’ Baxter’s abilities, but on this debut, his musical ambition is given the wide-screen scope it requires. Baxter has spent years crafting the perfect movie soundtrack in his head. Deep Red is that soundtrack brought to life, a record that takes in music informed by blaxploitation-style funk, stylish electronica and symphonic orchestration. Sometimes, as with the fabulous Punisher, all in one track.
While much of his music remains sample-based, Baxter refuses to be limited by the same notions of vinyl authenticity that obsess DJ Shadow. Instead of sampling Bill Conti’s Rocky soundtrack for opener We Took Pelham, Baxter got a Budapest orchestra to replay the music. But, just like Shadow with The Private Press, Baxter has made a record that seems to perfectly adapt itself to the ebbs and flows of the listeners life. The secret of great Djing is knowing what to put on next, knowing how to read the mood of your crowd. Baxter seems to go one better; it’s as if he has taken the temperature of your soul. An amazing album.

Independent On Sunday

The long-awaited Deadly Avenger album kicks off with a triumphant, brass and string-laden reworking of the theme from Rocky, most tracks thereafter reference some movie or other, and he’s said he wanted the album to sound like a soundtrack. Which is as good as admitting it’s just background music, and it’s true that midway through Deep Red does meander for a bit. But that it’s a lusher, more orchestral and less purely beats and breaks orientated album than expected is a good thing. Anyone disappointed by DJ Shadow’s Private Press might want to try this.

Logo

Damon Baxter, aka Deadly Avenger, lost his sense of taste and smell in a childhood accident, and the old wives tale has it that if you lose a sense then the others are enhanced to compensate: in this case it seems to be true, his hearing is flawless. ‘Deep Red’ offers a selection of chopped-up beats that pay no attention to artificial boundaries: hip-hop, R&B, break beats, soul and Blaxploitation funk are blended into a seamless whole. The twin keys here are Baxter’s parallel career as a Fabric DJ and his childhood love of the soundtrack work of John Carpenter, John Williams and Mike Oldfield’s ‘Exorcist’ tracking ‘Tubular Bells’. There’s a film playing in the background to every track here, whether it’s Carpenter’s The Thing (‘Punisher’), Friday The 13th (‘Blade’), Saturday Night Fever (‘Day One’) or an obscure arthouse flick (the rest). It’s compelling, deeply impressive stuff.

Ministry

Back in the late 80s there was a particularly gruesome American gore-movie fanzine called Deep Red that fascinated and disturbed its readers in equal measure. While there’s no way of knowing whether Scotsman Damon Baxter – aka Deadly Avenger – was a subscriber, it is immediately obvious that film (and, by extension, film music) has been a massive influence. Maybe that’s down to a childhood accident that left Damon with no sense of taste or smell – after all, with two such powerful and crucial senses dulled, it’s hardly surprising that the young Avenger saturated his eyes and ears, is it?
Well, the saturation wasn’t in vain. Deep Red may be that most clichéd of beasts, The Imaginary Soundtrack, yet thanks to Baxter’s long immersion in the celluloid bath-tub of history, we get to chew over fare a little more interesting than the usual (and crushingly tired) John Barry / Serge Gainsbourg / Lalo Shgifrin-isms that tend to get wheeled out every time some cheesedick with a sampler fancies showing his ‘class’. For this Imaginary Soundtrack straddles styles like its influences straddle decades.
So, what do you get for your money? Well, it’s safe to say that this Avenger has a thing for the paranoid, nervy energy of the great John Carpenter, whose own work on Halloween and Escape From New York made such great use of simple, grinding synth lines to create pace and tension. Take Blade for instance, where melodic, hypnotic Steve Reich-ian doodles sit easily against the sort of textural space travel sounds that (Alien composer) Jerry Goldsmith does so well. That a head-nod-happy break is jacked in too is a mere bonus, but one that never detracts from the meat of the piece. Current favourite Love Sounds, meanwhile, with its soft-focus, south-east Asian stylings and deep breathing, skilfully recalls the shift-in-your-seat eroticism of the early 70s Emmanuelle soundtrack. Sexy music! Lord above!
Punisher is the closest to the dancefloor-friendly DA of old, the one who’d knock out the break-heavy remixes for groove starved indie fuck-knuckles like the Manic Street Preachers. While it has an easy, rolling grace and an irresistibly bouncy bongo sample, it does plough the narrow furrow where over-driven analogue synths and hands-in-the-air breakdowns will (sadly) forever make you think of the (yawn) Chemical Brothers. Sensibly, though, the true heart of this album lies buried in its title track, for it’s here that Damon’s real love of drama and melody are allowed free rein to soar. Stark, lovelorn strings twist endlessly around a squelching, angry synth, while rolling rhythms crosshatch, shifting and reforming almost unnoticeably.
So, what we have here is another instrumental album made by a white bloke with a smart home studio set-up who likes funk and soundtracks, then. Haven’t we had more than enough of these already? Well, yes we have. On both counts. But what DAs Deep Red shows over and over again is that when a love of all kinds of music – from the softest acoustic trill to the darkest synthesised growl – meets a fully functioning brain full of a lifetime’s worth of imagery, then magic can still happen. Personally, we’d have liked a few more hideously violent zombie death scene moments, but that’s just us. Recommended certainly. But for adults only. 8/10

Mojo

Underground releases on DJ and his own Illicit label have hinted at musicologist Damon ‘Deadly Avenger’ Baxter’s abilities, but on this debut, his musical ambition is given the wide-screen scope it requires. Baxter has spent years crafting the perfect movie soundtrack in his head. Deep Red is that soundtrack brought to life, a record that takes in music informed by Blaxploitation-style funk, stylish electronica and symphonic orchestration. Sometimes, as with the fabulous Punisher, all in one track
While much of his music remains sample-based, Baxter refuses to be limited by the same notions of vinyl authenticity that obsess DJ Shadow. Instead of sampling Bill Conti’s Rocky Soundtrack for opener We Took Pelham, Baxter got a Budapest orchestra to replay the music. But, just like shadow with The Private Press, Baxter has made a record that seems to perfectly adapt itself to the ebbs and flows of the listener’s life. The secret of great Djing is knowing what to put on next, knowing how to read the mood of your crowd. Baxter seems to go one better: it’s as if he has taken the temperature of your soul. An amazing album.

Music Week

Damon Baxter’s debut album is a dazzling collection of breakbeat-based songs with a cinematic bent. While staying close to the ‘imaginary film soundtrack’ cliché, Deep Red succeeds due to the sheer quality and range of material

Muzik

The old dancefloor ain’t what it used to be, is it? House music’s for granddads, staying in’s the new going out, the rave is dead, ‘trance’ means some bird and two old Belgians on Top Of The Pops – what’s a producer with half a brain to do? Damon Baxter from West Lothian, Scotland, has an idea…
Damon made his name in the late Nineties, initially electro-ing it up for J Saul Kane’s Electron Industries imprint as Sem, then catching the darker side of the big beat boom. He even ended up remixing the Manic Street Preachers. Today, his solution to the problems besetting our nation’s knob twiddlers is simple. He’s gone to the movies.
David Holmes was the first to up sticks and knock on Hollywood’s door, but there’s a ripe Yankee dollar and tons of fun to be had across the pond. You’ll need a portfolio though, and ‘Deep Red’ is Damon’s. The opening ‘We Took Peham’ runs around wondering whether it’s a Spaghetti western or Rocky VI, ‘Blade’ is ‘Tubular Bells’ on speed (so The Exorcist, then), ‘The Quest’ dips a toe into Bollywood, while ‘The Quest Part II’ asks John Barry round for tea. The LP never leaves dance entirely behind – check out the techno blip-drums on ‘Black Sun’ – but adds a depth of orchestration and vision the average slapdash DJ knock-off can only dream of. Good luck out there then, Damon – Mr Scorcese will call you…

NME

Despite the movie world’s stubborn refusal to join in (when did a director last shoot a film for an imaginary soundtrack?), dance music producers can’t get enough of soundtracks for imaginary films. The bulk of which are pretentious, colourless affairs. However, breakbeat boffin Damon Baxter is at a distinct advantage. Firstly, ‘Deep Red’ isn’t a soundtrack album so much as, with it’s widescreen scope and 47-piece Hungarian orchestra, mood music. Moreover, Baxter’s hip-hop / martial-arts heritage and big-name remixes (Manics / Travis) mean that his debut album sits at an unusual confluence of influences; squiggly electro, Oriental touches and rock guitars adding pace, texture and funk to all that string-led drama. A real grower, give ‘Deep Red’ time and it will flourish. 8/10