Trimbal - Confidence Boost (Harmonimix)
In our interview with grime MC Trim last year, he told us, “Weird music attracts me, even stuff like Keri Hilson or whatever. I don’t really listen to grime these days.”
This doesn’t mean that it didn’t strike the world as, well, a bit odd when James Blake started reworking the MC’s vocal into his own ‘Harmonimix’ brand of glitchy sadness. Strangely enough, though, Trim seems to have found a bleak, bold niche in the off-kilter, gloomy form of Blake’s beats.
Finally awarded its own Rollo Jackson-directed clip today, ‘Confidence Boost’ has been floating about for a while now, immediately arresting with its warped isolation of Trim’s insistent vocal. The tragic hollowness of his “strike a pose” motto is nowhere made more obvious than in the skittering, soft, siren-framed cavern that is Blake’s production, and in the isolated, stark images conjured up by Jackson.
Dead-eyed stares, viciously lit flares and terrifying false fingernails add up to an uneasy, dangerous watch, breaking down the feeling of breaking down, and making you look it in the eye. As the music swells, the images flash in and out of darkness and the fires burn, the truly powerful thing here is that the faces of both Trim and Blake, both MC and producer, are featured heavily, both forming this new sound, and both owning it. It seems that the spirit of unconventional, artistically challenging collaboration, such as collaboration between a grime MC who “doesn’t really listen to grime” and a producer who helped invent post-dubstep at his piano, is more alive in 2012 than ever.
