Fred Falke is still living in the last century. To my mind, that's no bad thing, but if you're one of those dance fans who thinks the music constantly needs to be mutating into new forms, you may not be quite as excited by this news. Like so many French producers who came up in the wake of Daft Punk's Homework, Falke seems to think house music was perfected around the turn of the millennium, when the twin sounds of Thomas Bangalter's Roulé imprint and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo's Crydamoure label-ruled Parisian clubs.
There's not a single sound on Part IV, Falke's first solo album, that you also couldn't find on a French dance single from the late 1990s. If you were around at the time, or you've caught up on the pre-millennial Gallic glory days in the wake of DP's pyramid-rocking global success, the sense of déjà vu, of listening to an everything-in-its-right-place collection of familiar and still pungent tricks, will be time-warp disarming. The wildly woozy disco cut-ups of "Last Wave" and "Look Into Your Eyes", which spend seven or eight minutes chopping and filtering the same bits of insistent boogie bass and mantra-like soul samples, are straight out of Roulé's playbook. The massive synths all over the record, compressed to an overwhelming mid-range buzz, still split the difference between 1980s soft-pop and just-shy-of-dissonant tech-house, just like you'd find on a classic Crydamoure label cut. Even the harsh stuff, say the thuggish electro-goes-metal riff that drags "Bare Knuckle" through its paces, which you might think owes something to Justice and the Ed Banger crew's assaults on good taste from a few years back, still has its roots in Daft Punk at their most ear-scouring and inhuman.
Of course Falke's not the only current producer to be acting as if everything from minimal to dubstep never happened. The skyscraper-sized riffs, endlessly bumping beats (pitched between deep-house smoothness and stadium-sized techno ruthlessness), and extremist pop gloss of circa 1999 French dance are still everywhere these days, including your local Billboard-friendly pop station. Everything on Part IV is unabashedly huge and peak-time (or drive-time) ready. Slap a pop star on a couple of these tracks, and Falke could be competing with mercenary goons like David Guetta. The difference between Falke and the current crop of club-turned-radio kings, however, is that under the Ibiza-ready wall-of-sound there's an audible love for old-school disco, another thing that marks him out as a French heir to a very French tradition. The fluidity of the basslines all across Part IV nods to both Falke's origins as a bassist and the funkiness of the live band disco days, fluidity and funkiness being two qualities decidedly missing from the robotic ruthlessness of Guetta-style pop-house.
The question, of course, is do you need this album if you're already steeped in the classics? It'd be a fib to say that Falke does anything particularly unexpected or inventive with this material. He just knows what he likes, and he's got a very strong, slick grasp on how to assemble the "perfect" (if sometimes slightly generic) French house tune, to give you a powerful hit of an old drug. The styles plundered on Part IV comprise a long-proven formula for getting the adrenaline pumping, not something to sneer at when talking dance music. Falke's spent 10 years tweaking these templates until everything is maximally effective, and even if he's no innovator, at least we get to luxuriate in the rush.
