Music is so often about context, some music more than others. Such is the case with the latest album – the third – from Canadian electronic bolshies MSTRKRFT. It’s wilfully obnoxious, caustic stuff, a battering techno-based assault that cares not a jot for the classy deep house smoothness Disclosure et al have brought to dance music, nor, for that matter, the energized Ritalin frolicking of EDM. It’s closer in tone to The Prodigy’s battering last album, although on OPERATOR MSTRKRFT care even less about pop, polish and funk. So, in terms of context, at 3am, out-of-your-skull at a festival, it will probably be the best thing ever but, for the rest of the time, might prove a little much.
MSTRKRFT were born a decade ago of Toronto dance-punks Death From Above 1979, and there’s an aggression here that ignores dance music’s sexy, social side in favour of something much more confrontational. The three guest vocalists – Sonny Kay, Jacob Bannon and Ian Svenonius – all hail from the raging American noise underground, and their contributions, particularly Bannon’s gargled screeching on “Go On Without Me”, are uncompromisingly dissonant.
The album is named OPERATOR in honour of “operator culture”, a military concept whereby soldiers can view their work in terms of their specific actions (say, the complexity of driving a tank) rather than the results of those actions. The work’s stark, black and white cover art brings to mind Germany’s World War II military machine. In other words, OPERATOR is relentlessly about attack, attack, attack!
Where MSTRKRFT’s last album, 2009’s Fist of God, was tough but approachable, featuring a host of respected hip hop/R&B guest stars (John Legend, Ghostface Killah, Lil’ Mo, etc), their new one simply goes for the jugular, snarling. If you’re up for that, it’s a treat. The Bernard Herrmann Psycho string noises in “Death in the Gulf Stream”, the Plastikman-goes-industrial assault of opener “Wrong Glass Sir”, the discordant, detuned rave-piano machine plod of “Playing With Itself”, the whole thing, in fact, is a welcome two fingers to dance music’s current poppy 120 PBM complacency, speaking instead to those who – arguably more in tune with these times - wish to rage as they dance.
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