The title track from French producer and Ed Banger affiliate SebastiAn's debut album, Total, runs a little under a minute and a half. But the song's video makes economical use of its time, cramming hundreds of quickly edited pieces of footage both disturbingly violent and explicitly pornographic-- a decapitated body, a woman with a vaginal slit for a face-- into one ADD-affected piece of manufactured shock. Beyond thrill seekers, the meme brigade, and the endless offensiveness of 4chan, it's hard to conceive who the audience for this thing could be. In a way, though, it's representative of the Ed Banger aesthetic: aggressive and in your face, but not exactly where you look for deeper meaning.
Aggressiveness is still the name of the game on Total. The album's 52 minutes are packed with nasty-sounding, repetition-heavy grindhouse electro. SebastiAn's score for last year's Romain Gavras film Notre Jour Viendra showcased a more subtle, classical-indebted side, with warmly foreboding strings; you do get a glimpse of that here, albeit very briefly, on 45-second interlude "Night" and harpsichord-smothered "Tetra". Otherwise, if your familiarity with Ed Banger reaches as far as "those guys with the light-up cross," you know not to expect much in terms of nuance. In the current dance music climate, Total's sound comes across as crassly commercial and ultimately dated-- sometimes literally, as in the inclusion of grating years-old singles "Ross Ross Ross" and "Motor".
Total's most compelling moments dial back the frizzy, hard-hitting stuff in favor of smoother fare reminiscent of fellow Parisian crate digger Onra's R&B odysseys. Single "Embody" has a particularly slinking appeal, while the effervescence of "Arabest" and "Yes" is infectious. Most surprising of all is Mayer Hawthorne-featuring "Love in Motion", where the white-bread soul dude drops an enjoyably muted vocal over mutant bass and crisp handclaps. (Elsewhere, the album's other high-profile guest, M.I.A., barely coughs on "C.T.F.O.", a rote slice of churlish bass music.)
Highlights aside, Total's belligerence is as predictable as it is teeth-grinding. With rumors abounding that Ed Banger princes Justice are ditching their previous sound almost entirely in favor of hard-rock textures, SebastiAn may have given us the closest thing we'll get this year to what people would expect from a new Justice album. And that's a depressing notion.
