Audion - Alpha

Pitchfork 61

Over his long, evolving career, Matthew Dear has distinguished himself from America’s indie-electronic world through his outsized, wry personality and absolute open-mindedness to pop, whether under his own name, or as Audion, his louche techno guise. Starting with his very first single (“Hands Up for Detroit,” co-written by the late Disco D) through his first taste of “crossover” success (his inaugural vocal turn on 2003’s “Dog Days”), he’s never been afraid to make music that’s both artful and catchy.

Since relocating from Ann Arbor to the New York area in the mid-’00s, the music Dear’s made has increasingly unshackled itself from genre, embracing wider ideas of song and rhythm, ending up somewhere in the Bowie/Talking Heads/late-period Depeche Mode territory—as “electronic” as it is “industrial” and “post-punk” and “goth,” but really only adjacent to all of these. At the same time, he’s never pretended to abandon dance-music, and Audion has often served as the release of Dear’s techno Id. In the dozen or so years he’s been banging out lascivious and catchy tracks under that moniker, Dear has used it as a playground where hooks interact with techno’s progressive sonic ideologies.

Contradictory though it might at-first seem, “fun-first minimalism” has been Audion’s modus operandi from the get-go. The keeper on the 2004 EP Kisses is called “Titty Fuck,” seven minutes of filters and percussion patterns piled upon a two-part skeletal hook that’s driven into the ground until everyone in earshot’s gone mental. Much of Audion’s ensuing catalog turned that example into gospel (and set a tone for labels like Dirtybird): hard, repetitive dance tracks with a dirty-ish mind, a grimy sonic gleam attractive to both newbie ravers and veterans, more funky earworms and hookup stimulants than philosophical tracts. Even Audion’s release formats spoke to notions of pop immediacy, with the 2005 album debut Suckfish followed only by an army of singles (many not even pressed to vinyl for optimal legacy quotient), all featuring Will Calcutt’s hypnotic designs.

Another of Calcutt’s trademark patterns adorns the cover of Alpha, but besides that, few things around Audion’s long-gestating second album seem familiar—not its soft-focus darkness, not its pensiveness, not the minimalism with the negligible payoff. Instead, Alpha sounds like the character that once recorded a nice throbbing jack entitled “Just Fucking” has curtailed his libido and dragged out his Jeff Mills records for inspiration. (The most instantly magnetic one here, “Destroyer,” even has a title harkening back to one of Mills’ classic Underground Resistance co-productions.) This is a wonderful conceit but not the reason people come to Audion in the first place, and leaves the album fighting a catalog’s worth of pre-conceptions.

Yet if Alpha means to reposition Audion’s place in the world, it undersells this new perspective. The opener, “Dem,” downplays its beat in favor of a dank, echo-laden horrorcore, excellently setting up a downcast tone, but then instantly veers into a conveyor belt of stripped-d0wn bangers. They are crisp and marvelously engineered, but the catchy bits are nowhere to be found. Tracks such as “There Was a Button” and “Traanc” are acceptable as minimal-house DJ tools, but as greater parts of a long-playing whole, they seem lost for a broader context—a context Dear previously had no trouble offering.

Only at Alpha’s tail end does Audion’s (and Dear’s) personality assert itself. The hook of “Zunk Synth” is a grey-noise gurgle EQ’d in and out of the fog, as synth-pads and a percussive varietal built on tambourines and hi-hats puddle around playfully. And “Sicko” uses the album’s brightest keyboard line, plus a 909 bass punch, to build-up to the album’s biggest payoff, akin to the sound of an old-school disco dub. Unlike anything else from the prior hour, it closes the proceedings in wonderful style, Dear’s sound of Audion remembered. One just wonders: Why did it take so long?