Floorplan - Victorious

Pitchfork 68

If you’ve read an interview with Robert Hood in the last few years, you'll see that the Detroit techno pioneer obsessed with one question: What is the difference between an energetic Sunday morning at church and the rapturous hours of dawn spent at the club? To him, they both aspire to the same physical and experiential ends. Be it dark room or wooden pew, you should find yourself swaying, head to the floor, singing praises to something beyond yourself. They both function, at some deeper level, in the realm of the sublime and the ecstatic. For the last decade he’s lived in rural Alabama and has been working as a practicing minister when he’s not on tour. While the lifestyles might suggest a radical disjuncture, he thinks that they have to inform each other. And the music he’s released under Floorplan has been his primary vehicle for exploring the more spiritual ends of his musical identity.

He’s appeared as Floorplan on and off since 1996, but a full album of work didn’t materialize until 2013’s Paradise, a kind of career retrospective for the moniker. Overall, Floorplan is a departure from his epochal minimal techno work, orbiting instead around disco, gospel, and house. He’s also released some of his most iconic tracks as Floorplan, including “Never Grow Old,” which is a template for what you can expect structurally and thematically: exuberantly looped chants and a professorial level of attention to detail, both in production and song craft. And now he’s invited his teenage daughter, Lyric Hood, to co-produce the second full-length Floorplan album, Victorious, a 75 minute long test of Hood’s spiritual dance music.

His daughter first joined him behind the decks as a sixteen-year-old, and after a spat of touring that included a rather heartfelt closing set at Dekmantel last year, she’s helped co-produce much of Victorious. You can sense the youthful energy she imparts all over Victorious, which benefits from hanging a tad looser than Paradise. It’s eleven tracks are more open, more anthemic, and brighter than much of what Hood has done in the past.

It opens with the six-minute “Spin,” a clinic on structuring a house-music single, fashioned from effortlessly timed cues, jump cuts, and studied progressions. There’s a moment in “Spin” when the beat becomes vaporous and then solidifies, giving you a sense of how physical Hood can make electronic music feel. This physicality is made even more clear in the particularly religious-minded tracks like “The Heavens & The Earth” where a hypnotic reading of the opening lines of Genesis is placed on top of a warm pulsating synth. The line between club and church is forcefully collapsed, and it’s well-argued case study for the spiritual goals for this kind of music.

For all the seamless transitions within tracks, Victorious can feel a little incoherent as a whole. The tracks often end abruptly, closing their loops before they can pleasantly spill into the next moment. There is repetitiveness to the song structures that can feel predictable at a certain point. While you can sense something clunky about how these songs work as as a full unit, individually the tracks overcome the album’s shortcomings by not feeling overcrowded or overproduced. There is something delightfully dispassionate about the way they can reframe and reign in uncontrollable funk in “Tell You No Lie” or slyly weave a sermon in between the thumps of “He Can Save You.” But then other instances like “Ha Ya” can feel phoned in, and somehow the differences between each track can start still feel superficial on repeated listens.

Perhaps the biggest limitation to it all is that Victorious is in no way a headphone listen. It is constrained by site specificity. If there is a possible maximum-pleasure listening experience it will come from luxuriating in this music very loudly and perfectly articulated over multiple sets of speakers. Perhaps this is true of all dance music, but the thesis of Floorplan is especially grounded in a communal experience. In order to really have that ecstatic event Hood aims for, you simply cannot be behind a pair of headphones. Victorious is filled with moments that give you glimpses of the club in heaven, but like the afterlife itself, it’s always out of reach, distinct only in brief flashes and in feverish moments.