The Modeselektor duo are party animals and make upfront party music. What makes their take on party music interesting though is their wholesale appropriation and re-imagining of genres. Instead of making do with how a particular genre does sound, they take from its existing template and rework it, many times.
Happy Birthday is their second album and follows some excellent mix CDs and remix work, and two healthy European summers of touring and playing enormous festivals. Thus Happy Birthday is full of ‘big tunes’, tunes that are built for maximum dancefloor impact. They have even managed to sneak their Scooter track (‘Hyper Hyper’), a crowd pleasing pisstake/ode to happy hardcore and Euro trash that has been a part of their live sets for years, into the album. Where Berlin’s Hardwwax and surrounding universe has been a sonic meeting point of rarefied Detroit techno, Jamaican reggae and dub, and German techno, for nearly the past two decades, Modeselektor’s stylistic axis is considerably more globalised and lumpen-proletarian. In their tracks you can hear a confluence of grime, baile funk, Miami bass, hands in the air Euro trance, mid-range heavy French electro house (think Ed Banger), with a large injection of humour.
Parisian rappers TTC once again contribute scattershot rhymes to one of the tracks ‘2000007’ where their voices are, like on Modeselektor’s Hello Mom, glitched, shattered, whilst Paul St Hillaire (Tikiman) guests on ‘Let Your Love Grow’ – the closest on the album to dubstep – his warm voice coo-ing over the staccato beats. It is all hyped take off synths and step sequences on ‘Sucker Pin’, and the Puppetmastaz drop their silly rhymes on ‘The Dark Side of the Sun’ which is also the first single – in an odd German Dirty South hybrid. And elsewhere Thom Yorke lends his voice to the brittle IDM of ‘The White Flash’ which along with ‘Edgar’ are the album’s two more delicate electronic pieces recalling mid 90s Warp label material.
Hedonistic, irreverent, and upfront, there are no doubts that most of these tracks will rock dancefloors but I do wonder whether that is enough anymore?
