MODERAT – MODERAT (BPitch Control)
Nov. 11, 2009 by Josephine Tempongko & Tomas Palermo
This album kicks off on a really hopeful note. It makes you feel like a college freshman again you know, it’s all about potential and everything’s just over the horizon. It gets you real starry-eyed, thinking, “This is leading me into a world I can’t even imagine,” and, “If I can just get through this, everything’s gonna be awesome from then on!”
“Rusty Nails,” the album’s first single release, follows up with an earnest vocal delivery on the part of Sascha Ring, a.k.a. Apparat. This track is inarguably the most noteworthy on the album; Ring’s vocals have a contagious emotive quality that stay with you all day while you stare at your shoes, and the building crescendo of synths makes you want to raise your arms and close your eyes to the noon-day sun like you’re at some perky Ibiza rave, all sweaty and perverted in a tank top. Life is good. You’re really feelin’ it, man.
This momentum abruptly skids into an excruciating halt by the third track though, where things start to feel really uncomfortable and awkward. Moderat: “self-titled” seems more like Moderat: “the album that conquers the time-space continuum by sounding way longer than it actually is.”
The remaining tracks wander across a variety of seemingly unrelated and incohesive directions, ultimately climbing off with two tracks that, while beautiful, lose points on originality; “No. 22” gives a heavy nod to the dub- techno hybrid sound, while “Out of Sight” sounds embarrassingly too much like Burial’s “Raver” with Ring’s vocals recorded over it.
Moderat generally sounds less like an album and more like a compilation of timid ideas thrown together by a group of people that attempted a partnership, but for whatever reason failed to form a unit. Instead of creating something singularly more than the sum of its parts, Moderat has released what sounds like a headless brainchild. It ultimately reads like any other failed relationship; there were some good moments, but it just couldn’t hold itself together.
Collaborations are tricky, especially for artists coming from different stylistic traditions or points of view. When they do work, it can be magic. (Think groups like 4hero, Horsepower Productions, Massive Attack or Smith & Mighty.) Unite the right souls and the sound is heavy. Sadly, for every one or two dope collabos there are a ton of wack ones and a million self-motivated individual producers constantly coming up. In the best-case scenario, two or more distinct producers who share a similar artistic vision and creative context will blend their ideas into one solid whole. Such is the case with Moderat, which pairs Modeselektor’s Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary with Aparat, a.k.a. Sascha Ring, and renders an emotive, well-sculpted set.
With Berlin and techno as shared territory, the glitch-minded Ring had to abandon rigid rhythms to accommodate Bronsert and Szary’s more raggafied bounce. This comes together perfectly on “Nasty Silence,” which brims with shuffling drum patterns couched in soft, layered ambient synth beds. Like Ramadanman’s or Headhunter’s techy dubstep, the music pulses like blood pumping from the heart to rapidly moving limbs. That driving, epic sound reappears on “Porc#2,” a song that leans tantalizingly towards shoe-gazey indie-pop, tempered with Trentemøller- style electronic embellishments. Exactly what you’d expect from guys who count Thom Yorke, Ellen Alien and Shackleton among their friends.
The different elements – dubstep, techno, ambient, indie – fuse seamlessly on the album’s penultimate tune, “No. 22,” a fitting zenith that rumbles and builds like a volcano about to erupt. The tune opens with quiet atmospherics, muted voice snippets and an arpeggiated synth before solid beats drop like so many bits of molten lava. Listen to the album uninterrupted, especially the last five tracks, and you’ll hear a conversation that blends dynamic electronic voices into a rich, melodic chorus. The result is uplifting, and yes, heavy.
