Overseer — Wreckage

I have a chat with Rob Howes, aka Overseer aka Fatlantic, to talk shop about his debut album.

Just a quick note: I interviewed Rob in 2016 for this story, and it fell by the wayside of me doing “too many things,” so this might be a tad dated. Rob ended up leaving the Overseer moniker behind and recently released new music under the guise of Fatlantic. For your listening and homework you can listen to Wreckage here on Spotify.

One of the fondest memories I have of 2003 is when Warner Bros. dropped The Matrix Reloaded trailer. I was a young boy, who found himself replaying and replaying Trinity jumping off her bike into a security station and Neo demolishing unlimited Agent Smiths in the Burly Brawl.

I was made fun of for liking The Matrix (at the time it was The Matrix Reloaded) so much by some jerks at school. It was hard to deal with, but, at the end of the day, I always found myself coming back to that trailer and smiled; I felt a sense of energy, safety, and, most importantly, inspiration. While the images and sequences the Wachowski Sisters crafted all those years ago were iconic, thrilling, and filled with originality, they were propped up by a genre of music that has long since fallen into the dust.

Personal digression aside, what makes a trailer the sum of its parts is the music. You might have a stirring score that gently underscores emotional beats, or a thunderous row of drums to emphasise your action. Breakbeat is a genre that filled you with an energy unlike most genres, its broken 4/4 rhythms found a way to fill a heart with confidence before a big match, but it is very much a genre that the collective consciousness only heard before their feature film rolled, on their ESPN major sporting event ads and, even now, their car adverts.

So in all of those ads you’ve seen, movies you’ve watched, chase scenes that have your heart singing toward, Rob Howes — also known as Overseer but now known as Fatlantic — probably had his hand in it, whether intentional or not, he tells me, “I feel so lucky that it’s been used in the wider world, I honestly never set out to do music for films / games.”

I emailed Rob on a whim a few years back, just before Easter, and, despite his busy schedule, he got back to me. A producer based in Oxford, UK, Rob has been working in the business for decades, but found himself bathed in influences from the likes of Kate Bush to AC/DC; a varied group of identities that guided the creation of his own.

“Supermoves”, in particular, is almost an identity building track and sets the foundations for the rest of his album; a track in which you’ll find squelching and beating behind a lot of movie trailers. A track that presents the purest of energy boosts, with drums programmed to cramp your muscles, funky guitars that are washed through heavy processing, and strings pulled straight from a Hitchcockian murder sequence; there’s so much that has gone into crafting it that the track is almost omnipresent throughout the entirety of the album. Could you hear it in a club? Sure. Movie trailer? Absolutely. Sports broadcast? You bet. Cruising down the highway doing 100? Slap on those sunnies and drive safe.

Yet, in all of the explosive, powerful madness Wreckage presents, Rob still finds a way to scale it right back. Rob explains to me, “For drums it’s the obvious ones, really — The Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Tribe Called Quest etc but also going back to Meat Beat Manifesto, Ministry. All the early XL Records releases were quite an influence.”

All natural influences too. Those names are the titans and foundations for which electronic music became popularised in the early 90s to the very early 00s.

It’s not entirely surprising that his drum sound is so unique to his identity that wondrously, dreaming tunes like “Sparks” which has his crunchy drums, stripped back over the loving vocals of Rachel Grey still packs the extreme punch from his kick drums.

“I really love to do the slow emotive stuff as well, when we did Sparks I loved what Rachael did so much that I just wanted to do much more.” The track “Sparks” ended up sparking (forgive me) a deeper collaboration in the form of the group, Kanute, a pairing who emulated and furthered the initial seed that was the track on Wreckage.

“Initially I did some work on her (Rachael) album but the record company collapsed and it never happened — it was a few years later that we picked up the pieces and started the Kanute stuff.”

Listening to the album, you might think there’s a mess of different stylistic choices, and Rob would agree with you. He tells me the album “is a bit of a mess up” with BPMs ranging from one end of the spectrum to the other, and for the better.

Rob explains, “the album took a long time to record because Columbia Records sat on it for so long — I had time to re-write / finesse the tracks. Wreckage is a bit of a mess up stylistically because of the difference between what I wanted to do at the start of the album and at the end of the recording.”

And the rainy days, steaming tea sounds of “Heligoland” is a perfect breather after the breakneck pace of the album as a whole. It recites a warped version of the BBC4’s shipping forecast over slow, longing and magical strings; the kind of imagery that is sparked is of an icy wind breathing through your cottage atop a cliff under the grey English clouds.

“Heligoland can still catch me out, it’s perhaps the most personal thing on the album. It’s also near impossible to listen to any of it without thinking about some detail of the mix or arrangement.”

Rob’s description of that final track couldn’t more astute. The track is dreamy, emotional, and still has the purest essence of Overseer behind it: the drums. Yep, Heligoland feels less powered by its strings and its radio sampling, but by its drum break — a break that’s weaved in and out of Wreckage.

I’ll admit it’s a little sad that Overseer is no more but also it’s sorta special to have this one and only piece from Rob all those years ago. Wreckage does feel a bit like an artifact of a genre that begun its decline in the early 00s, but Howe’s knack for drums and energy as well as his control over his tempo choices really allow Wreckage to stand above the others.

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