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Meat Beat Manifesto, “Opaque Couché” (Flexidisk, 2019)

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Billed as a companion piece to 2018’s stellar Impossible Star, Opaque Couché continues Meat Beat’s recent hot streak with a double album packed with inventive and meticulously crafted dance music virtuosity. Given that Jack Dangers’ work has passed though quite a succession of different phases over the years, Impossible Star is indeed Opaque Couché‘s closest reference point, yet the two albums go in significantly different directions within their roughly similar stylistic territories (and only this one pays homage to one of the world’s ugliest colors). 

Whereas its predecessor embraced the feel of an inhuman and paranoid sci-fi dystopia, Opaque Couché takes that futuristic bent in much more playful and propulsively kinetic direction. Naturally, it all sounds great, as Dangers is a singularly exacting producer. His true genius, however, lies in how seamlessly he is able to mash together high art, deadpan kitsch, and vibrantly infectious drum loops. Admittedly, that has been true for quite a long time, but he seems to creep closer and closer to achieving the perfect balance with each new release.

The album opens on a deceptively creepy note, as “Untroduction” cultivates a palpable sense of impending menace with its gnarled, sweeping synth drones and cryptic samples from a psychological experiment. Unexpectedly, however, it segues into a killer party rather than bleakly futuristic alienation, as “Pin Drop” unleashes quite an amazing variation on the classic “amen break.” 

Musically, Dangers and Ben Stokes flesh out their brilliantly clattering groove with a deep bass line, some blurrily surreal chords, and a ghostly melody, but none of those elements are the real focus. The hyper-kinetic drumming is the heart of the piece and everything else is mere icing on the cake. In fact, “Pin Drop” fondly reminds me of all of the times I have been wandering around a city and stumbled upon an insanely virtuosic and funky drummer going absolutely bananas in a park or square. 

The beat itself is a familiar one, of course, yet Dangers and Stokes keep it fresh and wild with a vibrant array of fills. There are also some occasional surprises like the fleeting intrusion of a toasting MC that add nicely to the sense that the whole thing is about to careen off the rails at any second. It never does, of course, but does a glorious job of riding that line til the very end. 

Wisely, the duo refrain from ever trying to repeat the same magic formula, but they do return to Jungle-style break beats a couple more times with fresh twists. On the more nervous-sounding “No Design,” for example, the frenetic snares are augmented by disorienting swirl of robotic, chopped, and stuttering voices. “Critical Soul Vibrations,” on the other hand, sounds geared for the dancefloor: the robot voices feel more like hooks and there are some fairly musical and jazzy vocal samples that provide welcome human warmth.

The rest of the album can roughly be divided into two categories that are best described as “robot funk” and “minimalist electronic jazz,” though there are a handful of detours into brooding atmospheric vignettes, brief synthesizer experiments, and more industrial-minded fare scattered about. Some of the more polished and jazz-influenced pieces admittedly leave me cold, but highlights improbably come from every one of those directions at least once. 

Meat Beat’s “robot funk” side is perhaps best represented by the lumbering groove and squirming, sputtering electronics of “CarrierFreq,” which also features a weirdly poignant hook of a digitized voice lamenting “I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what to do.” A far more unlikely pleasure is “Forced to Lie,” which marries blurred and warped jazz chords with a trip-hop beat and a repeating loop of Wolfman Jack addressing some “birdbrains.” 

Elsewhere, a thumping house beat relentlessly propels the wonderfully jabbering and gurgling synths of “Present For Sally,” while Dangers’ distorted and deconstructed “rapping” adds an unpredictable and texturally vibrant splash of color to an insistent, industrial-damaged pulse in “[Ear-Lips].” Meat Beat’s jazzier side offers some pleasures as well, though that side tends to work best when its smoothness it counterbalanced by erratic, deranged-sounding synth patterns (which is the happily the case in “Call Sign”). 

Without that element of chaos, the jazzier touches walk a precariously fine line between endearingly woozy “space age bachelor pad” sounds and something that I could easily imagine getting licensed for a fashion runway show. For the most part, however, I very much appreciate the sophisticated approach to harmony on the album. There is a lot of underutilized ground between straight-up major and minor chords and Meat Beat are unusually adept at exploiting it (as far as electronic music artists are concerned, anyway).

It is worth noting that Meat Beat Manifesto have been releasing albums for thirty years at this point, yet Impossible Star was the first MBM album to fully connect with me. That does not necessarily mean that it towers above the rest of their oeuvre, though it is a truly excellent album. Instead, Dangers’ work has always been an omnipresent outlier for many of my own phases, forever hovering around the “now” sound of electronic music, yet always too eclectic and off-center to fully fit. 

With these last two albums, however, it feels like Meat Beat has reached an unusual creative plateau where they are no longer in the thrall of the zeitgeist. Nevertheless, Dangers’ long history in the trenches of underground dance music’s evolution has left him singularly skilled at tossing off constant seamless allusions to its varying styles. 

Due to that, this album manages to feel fresh and contemporary even while veering off in its own occasionally backwards-looking direction. That freewheeling and sometimes mischievous eclecticism is probably what defines Opaque Couché the most, as it is a kaleidoscopic mélange of styles improbably held together by a predilection for retro-futurism, unusual sample juxtapositions, and production perfectionism. These pieces vary quite a bit from one another, but they never feel like they do not belong together. Moreover, Dangers and Stokes seem quite easily bored by straightforward tropes, which ensures that even the more vanilla pieces have a more fluid and ambitious approach to bass lines, chords, and beats than most of their contemporaries. 

Of the two sister releases, I suppose I prefer the darker, more focused vision of Impossible Star to the more scattered and fun Opaque Couché, but the highlights and endearing curveballs of Couché add up to a similarly impressive achievement.

Samples can be found here.

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Meat Beat Manifesto, “Impossible Star” (Flexidisk, 2018)

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After a bit of a lengthy hiatus, Jack Dangers has returned with quite a bombshell of a new Meat Beat album. Self-described as resembling “an MC Escher optical illusion that spirals around and around and never seems to end,” Impossible Star feels like a deep and hallucinatory plunge into a dance club in a dread-filled, dystopian near-future. 

Everything I would expect from a new Meat Beat album is certainly present (vocoders, cool samples, infectious grooves, deep bass, vintage synths, etc.), yet Impossible Star feels like a large and unexpected leap forward. While Dangers has historically always been near the vanguard of fresh evolutions in dance and electronic music, this album is perversely backward-looking in a way, seamlessly synthesizing the best of MBM’s previous directions into something fresh like a post-industrial magpie. As a result, Impossible Star does not feel like a definitive (and unavoidably ephemeral) representation of electronic music in 2018 so much as it feel like something much more ageless, prophetic, and deliciously warped.

The brooding and claustrophobic opening piece, “ONE,” is not a particularly representative glimpse of what is to come stylistically, yet it is perfect for establishing the disorienting and unnerving mood of the album: eerie synths ripple, shimmer, and dissonantly blur together and a cold, indistinct female voice appears that sounds like a looped intercom message reverberating through an abandoned concrete edifice. It feels like reality itself is evaporating into a deeply alienating and lonely dream. 

The following “Bass Playa” does not dispel that feeling of inhumanity and isolation much, but the sickly and skittering jazz-inflected groove that kicks in at least signals that the album has begun in earnest. It is not until the next piece (“We Are Surrounded”), however, that it becomes clear that Dangers has some truly inspired new material to share. I hate to compare Dangers to anyone, but “Surrounded” unavoidably calls to mind the thrill of classic Aphex Twin, as it mingles a wonderfully erratic, jabbering, and squiggling synth motif with a propulsive groove and a queasily uncomfortable progression of blurred chords. 

It instantly became my favorite song on the album, as the sputtering derangement of the synth “melody” is wonderfully unsettling, unpredictable, and visceral. Eventually, the groove collapses into an outro that sounds like a confused and gibbering computer alone in an abandoned control room. That outro illustrates the evocative and unusual sequencing that pervades Impossible Star, as it is strewn with a handful of dazzling and elaborate set pieces separated by interludes of bleak atmosphere (or interrupted by distorted rogue transmissions).

Aside from being one of the album’s best pieces, “Surrounded” also marks the beginning of an extended hot streak that consumes roughly the entire middle section of the album, as what follows is a feast of wonderfully squirming and burbling synths; robotic voice commands; blearily surreal smears of chords; eclectic samples; and relentless forward motion. 

As much as I love some of the beats and hooks, however, the true brilliance of Impossible Star lies in Dangers’ skill as a producer, as he seamlessly juxtaposes textures and motifs to weave something that is both bracingly physical and a bit of an unreal mindfuck. Hallucinatory and disorienting textures and motifs are a bit of an obsession with me, but this album hits a sickly, feverish and vaguely curdled tone that I rarely encounter. Also, that lingering sense of disquiet and wrongness is rarely the focal point, instead existing as an omnipresent background haze to the sharply realized and dynamic grooves and vocoder hooks that consume the foreground. It is a delicate balancing act and Dangers handles it masterfully.

Also, aside from the more nuanced and detailed touches, there are some wonderfully overt feats of visionary sound design to be found as well. Naturally, the vibrantly squelching and jabbering synth hook of “We Are Surrounded” is one such highlight, but there are plenty of others. I especially enjoyed the brutally grinding high-hats that hit during the crescendo of “Unique Boutique,” as well as the relentlessly scraping, crunching heaviness of the beat in “Nereus Rov.” 

Also of note is the album’s 15-minute centerpiece, “Lurker,” which is a tour de force of something resembling bleary and drugged robot funk. It sounds like a grotesque parody of a motorik groove, like some sort of futurist Neu! pastiche playing at the wrong speed on a distressed tape as I lose consciousness and plow my car into a tree. On the other end of the spectrum lies another aberration in the form of “T.M.I.,” a lazily bouncing and rolling “pop song” of sorts. Again, however, something is slightly off, like a phrase that has been translated and re-translated across several languages. Or like a song that has been covered so much that it has lost its connection to the original piece (in fact, it sounds like Wire tried to mimic the sultry and languorous pop of Sadé and then a precocious robot tried to mimic that).

Dangers has appropriately achieved something with Impossible Star that should seemingly not be possible: evoking a paranoid, technological nightmare that is also a great headphone album masquerading as dance music. There is a depth and complexity at play that is quite compelling, yet it does not interfere all that much with the forward momentum of the beats. At its core, Star feels like a very crisp, precise, and expert trip through the last several decades of beat-driven electronic music that is competing with intermittent swells of loud ambient music or sound art happening in a neighboring room.Rather than sounding chaotic or messy, however, it sounds artfully disorienting—like it is meant to be there, but is just out of phase or slightly out of tune. 

That is not Dangers’ only trick though, as even his more straightforward motifs often have an element of funhouse-like disorientation to them: bass notes linger too long, textures are strangely corroded, and melodies feel too chromatic or random (like a code that got garbled by a virus). And sometimes it feels like the acoustics of Dangers’ studio were designed by a deranged German Expressionist, as motifs sometimes snarl or swim together in unusual ways. 

As much as I enjoy such details and moments, the larger reward of Impossible Star is only revealed when it is contemplated as a whole, as Dangers has woven quite a rich and evocative world: amidst his technologic dystopia, there are blissful snatches of old film scores alluding to better times, as well is crackling short wave radio transmissions that hint at darker ones to come. As such, Impossible Star is more than a collection of strong new songs: this is Jack Dangers’ Blade Runner (or possibly his Neuromancer).

Listen here.