“Is Drukqs Aphex Twin’s most divisive album?”
Piers Martin, A Disco Pogo Tribute To Aphex Twin
Twenty-five years after its original release, Warp Records reissues Aphex Twin’s Drukqs.
The album includes some of Aphex Twin’s best-known tracks, ‘Avril 14th’ and ‘QKThr’, and this is the first time this 4 LP album has been available as a standard vinyl release.
This new black vinyl quadruple LP edition comes in a gatefold sleeve with black poly-lined inners.
Here’s Piers Martin writing about Drukqs in A Disco Pogo Tribute To Aphex Twin:
Is ‘Drukqs’ Aphex Twin’s most divisive album? Reviews at the time point to it being poorly received in some quarters.
“Pretty vacant – techno’s king prankster just ran out of ideas” sighed Q magazine. “Let’s just say he’s no Erik Satie” said Spin, adding: “James seems perversely trapped by the potential for infinitesimal tweakage and cartoony effects offered by plug-ins”. “Too much cake and no nuts” The Wire noted. “Not so much career development as career regression”. Pitchfork scored it a mere 5.5.
Released in October 2001, ‘Drukqs’ was a grand, sprawling statement from a 30-year-old Richard D James that seemed to frustrate critics almost because of what it wasn’t – or because it couldn’t quite live up to the promise of what had come before. It arrived two and a half years after Aphex Twin’s biggest hit ‘Windowlicker’, a gooey cyber-funk number that once again wrong-footed his followers, and a track that capped a decade in which James appeared to mint a different genre with each new release. Towards the end of the 1990s, he’d flit from drill’n’bass to music-box confections to computer-controlled musique concrete, and then send up the Prodigy with ‘Come to Daddy’, all while populating his live shows with giant teddy bears and bodybuilders.
Having achieved so much so quickly – he built a world for Aphex Twin that left plenty of room for interpretation and speculation – his fans became used to being spoiled rotten. The weight of expectation around ‘Drukqs’ meant it would be very difficult for James to deliver something that satisfied everyone – something unheard-of and innovative that teemed with hits, all wrapped up in some mischievous concept – but as this 30-track, 100-minute-long flawed masterpiece attests, he gave it his best shot."
