Mondkopf: Rising Doom - Album Review

Mondkopf
Rising Doom
Rating: Yeah Daddy Make Me Want It

Mondkopf, AKA Paul Régimbeau, the Paris-based electronic artist, released his first album in 2009, the well received Galaxy of Nowhere, and has become a go-to remixer for artists like Caribou, Black Devil Disco Club and Golden Filter. His second album Rising Doom is an eclectic, yet focused release drawing from everything from house, electro, industrial, and techno. It is a lush, dark affair sounding akin to a dance version of Massive Attack's Mezzanine, finding lots of dark corners to hide out in. The beats are heavy and dark, with raw synths buzzing and clanging in the background. Rising Doom works best when the tracks focus on the beats and not so well when detouring into more ambient territory. The flow of the album gets compromised by too many ill placed beatless instrumentals that threaten to undermine the album as a whole. But the tracks that work, and there are many, are so well produced and sculpted that, in the end, the album still is effective.

Rising Doom is one of the first electronic releases in awhile that doesn't seem indebted to the dubstep genre, focusing more on machine-like aspects cultivated from artists like Tri Repeate ++ era Autechre, Clark, and some of the beat music from Flying Lotus. Although the music is pretty heavy at times, there are lots of touches throughout the record that bring it back down to a human level. "Day of Anger" contains some lovely Satie-esque piano melodies that bookend the throbbing menace of the mid-section, with thumping percussion and buzz saw synth lines.



The twinkling keyboard patches of "Sweet Memories" lighten the load of the churning, lurching percussion and low end bass.



And the crackling, glitchy synths, and dirty programming of "The Song of Shadows" could become unbearably tense, but the mid-point of the song is broken up with a gorgeous passage of cor anglais and organ.



Some of the less beat-driven tracks, in an effort to create more variety for the album, seem to fall flat within the context of the other songs. "Moon's Throat" falters under a heavy handled throat gurgling vocal sample and LSD trip synth lines. And the closing pair of "My Heart Is Yours" and "Fossil Lights" attempt to end the album on a note of M83-like grandiosity, but the two tracks feel half-hearted at best, with the closing 8 minutes of "Fossil Lights" being all build with no real release.



The album would have worked better if he had continued making tracks in the vein of ""Beyond The Golden Valleys" whose cavernous drum beats and squeltchy synth lines are consistently engaging,



the bee-swarm industrial haze of the throbbing "Where The Gods Fall,"



or the pulsing Portishead meets Justice track "Deadwood."



Rising Son is an excellent sophomore release for the up and coming French producer. Unfortunately, he makes the mistake a lot of artists do on a second album which is making changes to their sound that go too far outside their comfort zone and end up straining their signature sound. I applaud the fact he wanted to push his sound, but wish he had left it to a couple of tracks, rather than half of them.

Rating Scale:

Chilfos: masterpiece; coolest thing I've heard in ages.

Woof Daddy: excellent; just a hair away from being a masterpiece.

Grrrr: very good; will definitely be considered for my top releases of the year.

Yeah Daddy Make Me Want It: good; definitely invites further listens and peaks one's interest for more material.

Meh: not horrible, but certainly not great; could have either been polished, trimmed, or re-thought.

Jeez Lady: what the hell happened? Just plain bad. They should hang their heads in shame and be forced to listen to Lady Gaga ad nauseam as penance.

Tragicistani: so bad, armed villagers with pitchforks and torches should run the artist out of the country for inflicting this abomination on the human race.