Gui Boratto is as much a product of the democratization of techno as he is a preacher of it. While he started out in the early 1990s as a jingle writer in São Paulo before moving to rock production and performing, his subsequent move to techno was motivated primarily by the desire for control: He wanted to be able to run his own studio from his living room. And control he did: Chromophobia, his 2007 breakthrough on Kompakt, evangelized the steady bass pulse and austere dissonance of contemporary techno within the context of inviting, discrete songs. In 2007 Boratto and Axel Willner, aka the Field, mixed a powerful serum of pop-aware techno. They posited consumer-friendly full-length albums that appealed to rock listeners skeptical about dance music's extreme repetition and track-driven culture.
Take My Breath Away, the follow-up, folds the cold abstractions of techno into the lyrical sheen of synth-pop. You can take the album's title any way you like-- a reference to the Top Gun Berlin jam, a mawkish platitude, or a winking jab at both. In any case, the record is quite different thematically from Chromophobia. The latter was an elemental evocation both aesthetic (reflecting Boratto's desire to expand his expressive palette) and political ("Chromophobia" being a veiled reference to the racial and sexual tensions of the style). Cover art comparisons rarely do their subjects justice, but here it suffices: Boratto approached Chromophobia as an abstraction of design; Take My Breath Away is a living, breathing portrait painted in simple (maybe even simplistic) terms.
For better or for worse, Take My Breath Away feels comfortable and content. Boratto battered Chromophobia opener "Scene 1" with skittering rhythms and gong-like bass revelations, pushing the mix so far in the red it almost knocked the track off its rhythmic foundation. "Take My Breath Away" purrs in comparison, winding up tension not via rhythmic interplay, but by the fact that he's actually playing it straight. Single "Atomic Soda" offers the same sort of view from 10,000 feet, playing like a streamlined mix of Chromophobia's "The Blessing" before burning into and re-constituting itself via glitchy beats in the breakdown. The lead synth lines on "Colors" and "Azurra" could have been cribbed off a "Legend of Zelda" game, but Boratto contextualizes them within a sentimentalized backdrop and sells them convincingly: they are discrete little packets of schmaltz.
Fittingly, "No Turning Back", this record's standout track, reaches for the same heights of pop idolatry as Chromophobia's "Beautiful Life". Slower and kissed with cymbals from his drum machine's "Rock" kit, "No Turning Back" delivers on Boratto's unstated notion that techno's best grooves are really just rock riffs extended over longer time periods. Vocalist Luciana Villanova (Boratto's wife) also sang on "Beautiful Life", and her simple and divine verses again arrive pregnant with empty meaning. Yes, Boratto's loudest denial of techno strictures, smack dab in the middle of an album full of such denials, arrives in the form of a house music diva verse. The words themselves are so dull, they verge on parody; her voice is detached but holds dear to the song's platitudes as the siren-wail of guitars surrounds her, sublimely unexpected. It's one of the best songs of the year so far, but it may have delivered the final stroke in painting Boratto into his own corner of semi-serious banality. No turning back, indeed.
Boratto once told Stylus Magazine of "Beautiful Life": "There's that bassline at the end of the track-- well, I made a little joke. I was pretending to be like [New Order's] Peter Hook. It was just a little joke." I never really believed that New Order jab was really a joke. Boratto's fluency with the pop music idiom informs his eloquence within the hard jargon of techno. But what really makes his work special is his ability to speak two musical languages at once without sounding like he's pandering to either side. His deliberate inflections of melody often emerge with a ring of truth, especially as he guides his repetitions through the peaks and valleys of his little mostly-nonverbal anecdotes. One gets the sense, however, that in acknowledging where his inspirations came from and figuring out where his compositions will go on Take My Breath Away, he's misplaced the present tense and the once-present tension.
