Pitchfork

Various Production are gone from XL, but the English dubsteppers are no less shadowy and mysterious for the change. "Risen", from Various' forthcoming full-length collaboration with Gerry Mitchell as well as a Christmas package including a t-shirt and USB bracelet, does a similar "dubstep plus folk" as Jess Harvell described in last year's The World Is Gone, and as you'd expect, it's a lot more Halloween than ho-ho-ho. Organic drums and creaking squeeze-box keyboards of some kind loop over and over again in waltz-time, eventually joined by backing vocals that could be the oh-we-ohs of the Wicked Witch of the West's foot soldiers. Rather than sighing female vocals on top, though, we get Mitchell's avuncular burr, describing "fever vengeances", blood, damp gardens, and "lice scuttling around" in his hair. If lice were included in the Various t-shirt package, they'd have to tell us, right? Another reason to stay off the "naughty" list.