NICK SYLVESTER

Punk rock redux

NICK SYLVESTER — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:11:53 GMT

Blood on the Wall pump out the nostalgia
Try reimagining early punk as some physically intense and massively popular athletic contest.

DEDICATED: BOTW are playing ’70s punk as they remember it: aggressive and scary.

Not that I know much about sports, but try reimagining early punk as some physically intense and massively popular athletic contest — a game like basketball, with simple objectives like putting the ball in the hole and simple rules like Keep Bouncing That Ball, played for decades, its all-stars boasting not subversive moves but barely visible tweaks. A national spectacle about which no one would dare say, “You know what, I am sick of watching a guy put that orange ball in that hole — fuck this game.” If you can reimagine punk as that, think of Brooklyn rock trio Blood on the Wall as this mostly winning Phoenix Suns–type deal, and their third album, Liferz (Social Registry), as a mostly solid season, maybe not like last year’s, but getting to the playoffs for sure.

Music critics, for whatever idiotic reason, tend to get stuck on expectations of originality. Blame the yellow British press, though we Americans are just as guilty of adhering to the mantra “If It Ain’t New, Don’t Break It.” New means you’re breaking a story, storybreaking means importance, importance means readers, and readers means ad money. At a certain point, this logic kills the music, and if you saw what Pitchfork did to that band Black Kids last year, you know how it all ends.

Not that Blood on the Wall care about any of this. Neither “artists” nor a “rock band,” they call themselves mere “rock-and-roll revivalists.” A matter of semantics, for sure — BOTW, say BOTW, are playing Rock Band to their own songs. But it takes the pressure off, and that means their new songs scream and fly and kick ass. With no worries as to what they’re doing, BOTW (and we) can concentrate on what they’re doing right: how the guitar in “Go Go Go” sounds like power cables on the brink of catching fire, how the bass tones in “Rize” move like thick liquid paint, overwhelming the mix and filling up all the empty space, and how closer “Acid Fight” reimagines a bad trip (“I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s in my face!”) without being, as it were, jammy psychedelic rock. You’re not expecting anything original — which means you might actually have a chance to enjoy the music.

Adolescent funks

NICK SYLVESTER — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:24:20 GMT

Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox takes a solo shot
Bradford Cox reminds me of my man Polyphemus — not just the one Odysseus conned in the cave but the one posted up in the countryside and pining in song for the sea nymph Galatea.

HEALER: With Atlas Sound, Cox is a confident singer-songwriter dwelling in the adolescent funks he thought he’d surmounted.

More than most, Bradford Cox reminds me of my man Polyphemus — not just the one Odysseus conned in the cave but the other one as well, the one posted up in the countryside and pining in song for the sea nymph Galatea. Song was his pharmakon, the cure for melancholy, but also the poison that kept him lovesick. The idea is a stone’s throw from Cox’s press release, where the Deerhunter frontman describes the aim of Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel (Kranky), his shimmering new bedroom-rock solo effort as Atlas Sound: “I want to make music that could be ‘healing’ or therapeutic to people who relate to it.”

After Cox’s drone-punk act Deerhunter took off last year, he would talk in interviews about his struggle with Marfan’s syndrome, a genetic disorder that has left him with disproportionately long limbs, a drawn face, sunken bovine eyes, and who knows what heart complications. The disease has left him looking cyclopean; grade-schoolers being the assholes they are, it’s left him feeling cyclopean too. Positioned that way, Deerhunter music sometimes sounds confrontational, each song an outcast’s well planned revenge. On stage, Cox would wear wedding dresses doused in blood, and at one show he even received a blow job from a bandmate — not necessarily groundbreaking stuff, but the gestures were confident, and the confidence was unsettling. Deerhunter’s Cryptograms LP and Fluorescent Grey EP (both 2007 releases on Kranky) were self-assured, the artistic capitulation of this young man realizing his limitations: who he was, what he looked like, what he loved and what he couldn’t, what he was good at, what he wanted to do.

So if Deerhunter are an aggro act born of ostracism, Cox’s posture in Atlas Sound, who perform upstairs at the Middle East this Tuesday, has flipped a bit. Here’s a confident singer-songwriter dwelling in the adolescent funks he thought he’d surmounted: exclusion (“River Card”); bullying and physical abuse (“Bite Marks”); confused sexuality (“Winter Vacation”); death (“Recent Bedroom”); “waiting to be changed” (“Quarantined”).

Pop in a hard place

NICK SYLVESTER — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:49:42 GMT

Black Dice’s Load Blown
The norms Black Dice resist are significant and strong and worth resisting.

Not that I’d call it a silver lining, but one real-time positive I see coming out of this writers’ strike — at least for television — is that we’re reminded that there are still wizards behind those curtains, that television is a product, manufactured by a business. An old one, too, with what are now well-codified ways of distributing and presenting and financing its entertainments — to say nothing of the strict and well-known tropes of its content.

Take sit-coms. We’re reminded now that somebody at some meeting said, “Hey, I know something that will make people laugh: a three-act half-hour show about a dysfunctional family.” And at some point, that show was a huge hit. Soon somebody ripped the dysfunctional-family formula, made some cosmetic changes, and then that dysfunctional-family show became another huge hit. It happened again and again and again, and the more “dysfunctional family” became synonymous with “entertaining sit-com,” the more difficult it was for both television watcher and television producer to imagine “entertaining sit-com” without “dysfunctional family.” The DF sit-com became normalized; non-DF sit-coms were and are dismissed as unentertaining. Which is to say that successful non-DF sit-coms, like Seinfeld and The Office, are flukes. But then there’s YouTube, which is neither DF nor sit-com but is immensely entertaining and successful. At this very moment, YouTube is dismissing at rapid clip these institutionalized notions of how and what people want from their entertainments.

What does any of this has to do with Black Dice? Well, if pop music could ever break free from its own version of the dysfunctional-family formula, there are those of us who believe that this Brooklyn trio would be the biggest band in the world. For the last decade, particularly the second half of it, Eric Copeland, Bjorn Copeland, and Aaron Warren have produced some of the most immediate, satisfying, and poppy songs I’ve heard. But because they don’t enter fully into the expectations of trad pop music (three-minute singles, steady 4/4 drumbeats, guitar/bass/drums line-up, singers singing words, Western notions of tuning), because their songs are born of different expectations and structures, Eno-like, as if it were pop music from a different planet, you’re not going to hear Black Dice on commercial radio. Indeed, you’ll rarely hear people call what Black Dice do “songs.” Some might not even consider them musicians. The polite hipster will incorrectly call Black Dice a noise band — anti-musical rebels, anti-structural nihilists.

Burial

NICK SYLVESTER — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:00:32 GMT

Untrue | Hyperdub
Dubstep has been given its Dizzee Rascal moment with the release of Burial’s Untrue , the elusive London producer’s second album.

Brooklyn calling

NICK SYLVESTER — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:43:01 GMT

Good music in the outer borough
Below are new sounds from four very different Brooklyn acts.

Peanut Butter Wolf Presents 2K8: B-Ball Zombie War

NICK SYLVESTER — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:47:54 GMT

Stones throw
Stones Throw’s latest label comp, 2K8 , celebrates the indie hip-hop imprint’s deal with 2K8 Sports, who put out all those 2K video games for Xbox and PlayStation.

FARC

NICK SYLVESTER — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:57:12 GMT

Stuff you've never heard and "Fuck A Record Company"
You’ve probably heard of two of the “indie” hip-hop artists below, even if they’re bypassing trad distribution models and just giving away their music.

Far into the Future

NICK SYLVESTER — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 19:19:02 GMT

Tim Sweeney's nighttime playlist
Almost every Tuesday night, New York DJ/producer Tim Sweeney live-mixes disco, house, electro, and offshoots and recombinants thereof.

Résumé: Selected + Mixed by Citizen Crew

NICK SYLVESTER — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 19:42:10 GMT

Citizen
The French labels Kitsune, Ed Banger, and Institubes have clogged dance bins with aggro, monochromatic, twitchy filter metal.

Chicago-based experimental

NICK SYLVESTER — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:26:45 GMT

The year of Kranky
Rarely is one label responsible for so many of the year’s best releases.

Culture clash

NICK SYLVESTER — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 19:32:02 GMT

M.I.A. confronts American pop protocol
If there were two golden rules worth following for this reviewer gig, they’d be never conflate an artist’s backstory with her product, and never read other people’s reviews.

VIDEO: M.I.A., "Boyz"

M.I.A., "Come Around (remix)"

If there were two golden rules worth following for this reviewer gig, especially when diving into rock-crit-lovefest discs like M.I.A.’s new Kala (Interscope), they’d be 1) never conflate an artist’s backstory with her product; and 2) never read other people’s reviews. I broke GR2 about three weeks ago when nearly every publication I turned to barraged me with the same glowing review. Make no mistake: this is one of the best records of 2007. But in the wake of it, I discovered the rare ease with which reviewers were breaking GR1. Dots had been studiously connected, from the left-field hip-hop sonics and aggro-political sentiment of Kala to the Sri Lankan Londoner’s visa troubles, the disarray of her Brooklyn apartment, her relationship status with ex-beau DJ/producer Diplo, her extended visits throughout Africa and East Asia, the last time she talked with her terrorist daddy, that time her mother (whose name is Kala) refused to accept the sofa M.I.A. bought for her, the fog surrounding her “real” age . . . Reviewers were treating M.I.A. as an oddity: who and why and how was this beautiful brown-skinned girl shouting about the price of AK47s in Africa? But the flip of that question seems more appropriate: why is M.I.A. even an oddity? And, in terms of pop sensibility, how does she offend?

The first song, “Bamboo Banga,” is the album’s longest, clocking in at five minutes — a dare of sorts, right out of the gate. This demanding track begins with a battery of tom-toms and then a stark melody-less rhythm, with just thumps of bass and distorted handclaps and M.I.A.’s atonal reverbed ramblings. The words she’s saying — “roadrunner, roadrunner, going 100 mile per hour” — are immediately recognizable from the first Modern Lovers LP. The relevance of the reference is at best nebulous.

There’s something sardonic in opening a major-label disc this way, with borrowed words and no easy hooks. It’s not unlike Nirvana’s “Serve the Servants,” the first track on their 1993 follow-up to Nevermind, In Utero. People may have wanted another “Smells like Teen Spirit”; instead they got a mess of guitar distortion that entered a beat before expected, and a choice cut of self-saboteur Cobain’s cynicism: “Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old.” But M.I.A. goes a step farther, because “Bamboo Banga” never really relents. It remains throughout a dizzying assault on American pop sensibilities, the lyrics playing on her outsider status with linguistic errors that have M.I.A. fancying herself a Kipling-style savage: “We’re moving with the packs like hyena-ena.”

The dark side of the rainbow

NICK SYLVESTER — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:49:03 GMT

The new medium of the YouTube mash-up
Does the simple fusion of audio to video count as high-quality entertainment?

VIDEO: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cover Throwdown

Sometime, perhaps around 1994, somebody noticed that when Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon plays alongside a muted VHS of The Wizard of Oz (the album beginning on the MGM lion’s third roar, the Oz film being the 30 frames/second NTSC American version), a number of strange coincidences occur. During the “Time” guitar solo, the fortune teller’s sign is shown with the words “Past Present and Future”; the cash register sounds in “Money” just when Oz goes technicolor; “Brain Damage” starts right around when the Scarecrow sings “If I Only Had a Brain”; the album’s final heartbeats come right when Dorothy ears up to the Tin Man’s thoracic cavity. There are more than 100 instances of meaningful synch, and spirited debate continues over what one should play after DSotM finishes its first iteration. (The movie outlasts the music, so one either puts DSotM on repeat or plays Animals and then tracks two through five of Meddle.) That the band and its producer, Alan Parsons, have denied any intentional synchronicity has only furthered the fanaticism; some deep in the cult believe that the “Dark Side of the Rainbow” is, among other things, an expression of “the collective subconscious of humanity.”

Consider the spirituality with which people can imbue coincidence, and the vast amounts of audio and video content available on the Internet, and the Internet’s movement away from traditional one-way models of content generation and consumption and toward those that democratize media and thrive on user interactivity. Suddenly it’s not too difficult to sense the pending explosion of on-line video remixes. Allowing users to upload audio and video via YouTube in the interactive Flash video format was the first step. The next, the one we’re about to see, the one that will further both the legal and æsthetic woes and wows of the first, is the providing of users with tools to clone, edit, post-produce, and reappropriate the works of others, with potentially unprecedented ease and speed.

In mid June, YouTube launched the YouTube Remixer, a free, stripped-down editing program powered by the Adobe Premiere Express engine. And that was three months after Photobucket had partnered with Adobe to provide more or less the same “remix and mash-up service,” with a crucial additional feature that allows users to import other Photobucket users’ media. Lesser-known video sites Gotoit, Jumpshot, and Flektor all have similar fairly intuitive Web-based programs that give users the ability to import, cut, effect, and audio-synch footage from their own sites. None is as stable or as feature-packed as, say, Apple’s desktop program iMovie, but the significant advantage the Web-based tools have over iMovie is that they are fully integrated with the content and the distribution, and they eliminate the physical and technological difficulties involved in working with others’ footage — they’re just right there.

Common

NICK SYLVESTER — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:03:16 GMT

Finding Forever | Geffen
Can you fault a Second City 35-year-old Gap-shilling rapper for wanting to make elevator hip-hop for Second City 35-year-old Gap-wearing yuppies?

Not better off dead

NICK SYLVESTER — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:12:04 GMT

Art Brut find their way in the post-punk world
Three years ago, London’s Art Brut debuted with a punk-rock song called “Formed a Band.”

MISFITS: For Art Brut, getting through to “the kids” isn’t just a matter of selling more units.

Three years ago, London’s Art Brut debuted with a punk-rock song called “Formed a Band.” They harangued Britain over beefy overdriven downstrokes, showing designs on Top of the Pops, deflecting your snipes and mine with a caveat: “It’s not irony/It’s not rock and roll/We’re just talking/To the kids.” Like boomer parents in 1977 when God saved the Queen, or Bill Cosby when the teenage Cos blared bebop from his bedroom: if you didn’t get Art Brut, Art Brut said, maybe you weren’t meant to.

That attitude defined the band’s debut Bang Bang Rock and Roll LP in 2005 — so what to make of “St. Pauli,” the third song on their follow-up, It’s a Bit Complicated (Mute)? After insisting that “punk rock is nicht tot” (“not dead” auf Deutsch), frontman Eddie Argos suddenly recants, as if seeing that the show’s not going over well; he turns around to his bandmates and pleads with them, “The kids don’t like it/The kids don’t like it/What else can we do when the kids don’t like it?” The question is familiar to anybody who got tricked into reading one of those ridiculous “Rock is dead!” screeds, but here it leaves a welt, if only because the bandmates refuse to answer. “We’re Just Talking to the Kids” worked for BBRAR, but Art Brut let “The Kids Don’t Like It” cast a pall over Complicated. They use it as a header for a new batch of even more conflicted break-up songs, for songs about being not so young anymore but still poor and exhausted, for songs about rock music and how we used to interact with it.

Before I get into that: turn on JAM’N 94.5, where you’re likely to hear Atlanta’s hip-hop Shop Boyz doing “Party like a Rockstar.” “I’m on a yacht with Marilyn Manson getting a tan, man,” brag the Boyz, a lightly distorted guitar climbing up and down the minor scale alone behind them, something like a more polite version of crunk. In the video, the Boyz lead a crowd through a litany of rock clichés, smashing guitars, moshing, trading devil horns, crowdsurfing, dancing with busty women, making things explode. “Rockstar” is silly, its reference points dated, but it’s not really satire, or farce, even. Rappers have been partying like rock stars for more than a decade now, probably even more than rock stars do, with so few of them left anymore. Just because rock stars don’t party like rock stars doesn’t mean partying like a rock star is any less unimpeachably awesome. But “Rockstar” feels detached, like an ’80s-themed costume party at the Pi Kappa Alpha frathouse, college kids dancing in the awkward manner they learned off VH1, to dated pop music they recognize and maybe even like but don’t necessarily relate to. So rock in “Rockstar” is a mesh of karaoke and playacting and dress-up. The genre’s a sturdy set of signifiers but, post-hip-hop, no longer the default music of the young masses, no longer their trustworthy communicant.

Sonic couth

NICK SYLVESTER — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:22:12 GMT

Deerhunter and Seefeel bring the right noise
Music is more or less a mess of tensions. Deerhunter, "Wash Off" (mp3)

VIDEO: Deerhunter, "Strange Lights"

Music is more or less a mess of tensions — between two notes, one chord and the next, melody and harmony, tone and noise, rhythm and sound, lyrics and musical mood, and so on. But if you asked for a favorite, I’d say tone and noise. It’s maybe the most “rock” of them all, too, given the weird nature of the genre’s key instrument, the electric guitar; the ability to amplify soundwaves comes at the price of distorting them, muddying them up. Most ignore that fundamental irony; some can’t get past their own nihilism and just start noise bands; a few others try exploring somewhere in the middle but come up short or self-satisfied or both. Atlanta’s Deerhunter aren’t the new Sonic Youth, or whatever, at least not yet. (Right now, anyway, Sonic Youth are the new Sonic Youth.) But between their fantastic Cryptograms album and their new Fluorescent Grey EP, which is even better (both are on Kranky), they’re thinking of themselves along those lines, as a pop band unafraid to sabotage themselves, to let the instruments take over and resonate, reverberate, kick, yell, and scream in all their alternating current glories.

It’s the dud of duds to talk about honesty or purity in pop, especially since all critics have seen The Matrix by now and think they’re obliged to point out how everything everywhere is just a construct (dude). Either way, a song like Deerhunter’s “Wash Off” tells a good rock-and-roll story: the buzzing guitar amps and disjointed beats and piano vamps, the tense haze of unintelligible vocal reverb and atonal guitar stabs set to drum ’n’ bass motorik, the huge messy impossibly catchy release, the whole thing apparently a tale of ardent youth and the loss of it. “I was 16,” sings Bradford Cox. Another one, “Like New,” might be the best Coldplay song ever written, a soaring ballad devoured by guitar strums stuck interminably in echo. Once again the lyrics are masked — all we get is a command, or a wish: “Be like new.”

A pop band like Deerhunter (who come to the ICA next month) can be incredibly frustrating, however. They can and do write huge songs, but they always futz with them or bury them in an album of guitar drones, and for some music fans that must seem self-indulgent.

In anticipation of summer

NICK SYLVESTER — Tue, 22 May 2007 18:01:47 GMT

Summer songs for regular people
Here are four reminders of what this summer holds for the lot of us.

Subtle stars

NICK SYLVESTER — Mon, 21 May 2007 21:45:27 GMT

Separating Maxïmo Park from the pack
In the gaps between words are the things that really intrigue me,” sings Maxïmo Park frontman Paul Smith on “Girls Who Play Guitars.”

VIDEO: Maxïmo Park, "Our Velocity"

“In the gaps between words are the things that really intrigue me,” sings Maxïmo Park frontman Paul Smith on “Girls Who Play Guitars.” For most of the song, Smith has been lamenting gone-wrong love over polished punk rock that’s typical of the Newcastle band’s new album, Our Earthly Pleasures (Warp), so this semi-cheesy, semi-artsy line jumps out. It reads almost like a statement of purpose, as if to say, “Yes: Maxïmo Park are an in-the-gaps band.” Even in “Girls,” the way Smith transits from “we” to “me and you” to just another “she” is subtle, felt more than heard, the details never oversold.

Then again, there’s not much to get with Maxïmo Park (who come to Great Scott July 11). They play tight, fast, radio-friendly rock songs with guitars that sound like other tight, fast, radio-friendly rock songs with guitars. They do have a few songs that mention books, and one called “Russian Literature,” but it’s not as if the lyrics were stuffed with Decemberist-type malapropisms. Back in 2005, many wrote the band off as new-post-punk johnny-come-latelies following the success of Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party and the Rakes and the Futureheads, whose herky-jerky tempo breaks were kissing cousins to Maxïmo’s. Which was tough to argue with, especially since Maxïmo shared producer Paul Epworth with many of those bands. Epworth gives scrappy indie acts gloss, sanding off enough rough edges to get them serious radio play and mainstream success. That happened to Maxïmo in the form of 2005’s “Apply Some Pressure”; the song even landed on a few video-game soundtracks. The band’s A Certain Trigger debut went UK platinum, their latest single, “Our Velocity,” peaked at #9 on BBC radio, and Our Earthly Pleasures debuted in April at #2 on the UK album charts. So these guys don’t need me to go to bat for them.

Or do they? It’s as if all the new UK guitar bands were competing to occupy the same “new UK guitar band” niche. Which is a problem when you’re Maxïmo Park, who — unlike many of their clownish contemporaries — do have a lot of charm in the gaps, in the details. Anybody can pick out the Devo-like synths that open “Our Velocity,” or the Johnny Marr–like guitar arpeggios up and down “Books from Boxes,” or the anxious Billy Joel piano stabs in “Russian Literature,” or the sappy Bill Joel piano twinkles in “Your Urge,” or the influence of XTC’s Drums & Wires throughout. But why is there so little talk about how producer Gil Norton has made the guitar sounds on “Girls” brash and monstrous with no compromise to their agility — and how puny the bands that Epworth produces sound by comparison? Why no mention of how, in “Books from Boxes,” Smith puts Morrissey’s crippling self-consciousness about relationships through further reflexive anxieties, becoming self-conscious about that very self-consciousness — and how this manifests itself as self-sabotage and utter passivity: “You have to leave. I appreciate that.”

Blowing up

NICK SYLVESTER — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 19:53:41 GMT

The ringtone champs
I’m guessing most people know this by now: album sales continue to tank.

Production lines

NICK SYLVESTER — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 14:07:09 GMT

Timbaland’s shockingly bad Shock Value
The guy builds songs.

MAGIC FORMULA: What else is there to hear in “Why I Are” besides a rich man telling poor people it’s okay to be poor?

Let’s not forget that megaproducer Timbaland takes his name from a brand of construction boots. The guy builds songs. Ten massive 2006 pop tracks — including Hot 100 toppers Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous Girl” and Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” and “My Love” — he can claim responsibility for, to say nothing of a decade’s worth of radio-altering Number One Song productions for everyone from Missy Elliott to Jay-Z to Aaliyah. Just as Miles Davis reminded jazz that leaving the right notes out was as important as putting the right ones in, Timbaland’s sense of space in hip-hop smacked the breakcentric genre upside the head. He popped snares, exploded bottoms, and left a universe between the two frequencies, working in the polyrhythms and tug-and-pull and melodic structures and instrumentation of Eastern and East Asian musical traditions without seeming gimmicky. Timbaland makes a perfectly fine hip-hop producer like his nemesis Scott Storch sound like “just a piano man,” so much do Tim’s songs arrive, bristling with an energy that demands so much more from the artist than a paycheck. He’s unafraid of the past and unafraid of melody — both major hang-ups for present-day minimalist producers. He knows that there is no lost chord, that all Number One Songs are made up of bits and pieces of other Number One Songs. He’s exacting and precise, extremely aware of how, what, and why good pop music works, and as far as I can tell he’s not going anywhere — his sound banks maybe, but his truly modern approach never.

And now, somehow, I have to explain to you why Timbaland’s new Shock Value (Interscope) — an album that proceeds pretty near as described above — is truly awful, maybe even vile. I have to explain how this sleek-sounding, hour-long, star-studded folder of leaked MP3s has reawakened all my deepest insecurities about this business of pop music and writing about it. I have to explain how a guy who has his magic formulas, who has birthed some of this decade’s most transfixing stretches of sound, has made an album not of magically formulated songs but of magic formulas. How that strikes me as contempt for both his art (i.e., music) and his audience (i.e., yours truly). How there’s a difference between pop music in 2007 and “the sound of pop music in 2007.” And how Shock Value is squarely the latter.

Technophilia

NICK SYLVESTER — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:23:21 GMT

Brazil’s Gui Boratto embraces IDM
The year being 2007, had I started off telling you this new Gui Boratto album is “intelligent dance music,” you’d have stopped reading right then and there.

LP-LIKE: It’s not just “for the sake of variety” that there’s variety on Chromophobia.

The year being 2007, had I started off telling you this new Gui Boratto album is “intelligent dance music,” you’d have stopped reading right then and there, maybe even logged onto your personal home computer and found a picture of me on-line and shopped some dude’s bird in my mouth. IDM as a term was early-’90s DOA, a nice hook for PR onesheets that soon became anathema. Which is why we have all these people calling themselves “electronic artists,” whatever that means. For all the fantastic music that found itself under its leaky umbrella — Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Mouse on Mars, the Warp label’s mostly solid early catalogue — IDM is now a vicious slag, shorthand for boring, hookless abstract beats for the semi-pop turtleneck set.

This is as a good a time as any to mention that I still wear turtlenecks and listen to IDM from time to time, often both at once, but beyond that . . . maybe what I’m trying to say is that I don’t expect full-length dance albums to be front-to-back bangers. Leave that for DJ mixes. So Chromophobia (Kompact) is IDM to my ears because sometimes Gui Boratto takes up electronic dance music’s function (i.e., to induce dancing) and other times he explores the genre’s form (i.e., techno’s traditional rhythms and sounds and textures and ornaments and tempos that combine and recombine to form our favorite tracks). What makes it “intelligent” is that it’s up to the listener to separate form from function. Boratto’s more abstract tracks give breadth and depth and back story to the album’s many floor killers.

I say “techno” because Chromophobia strikes me as very second-wave Detroit, very Jeff Mills, the way the overture of synths in “Scene” cascades in couplets, the way the bass rumbles and rattles across the pan without being too ravy about it. Boratto’s tones are softer on the ear (Mills’s pricked mine into Pong-like paranoia), and his best tracks are just funkier. Highlights include “Shebang,” whose rubber-ball rhythms respond/react until the whole thing switches over to a devastating, monolithic 6/4 shuffle, and the nervous waterdrop hook on “Gate 7,” and “Terminal,” which has this fearless ascending melody that reminds me of Booka Shade’s “Mandarine Girl,” soon slurping its way into another register.