Better on paper than in practice, glitch-hop was semi-hot around the turn of the decade, when hordes of electronic music listeners realized that IDM probably couldn't survive on sonic sculptury and naval-gazing alone. Musical Darwinism eventually won out, though, and after a few years' worth of dud records and even dudder MCing, glitch-hop eventually went the way of your garden variety Scott Herren pseudonym, never to be awkwardly nodded along to again.
If you remember any of that, or worse yet, happened to be one of those gullible enough to part with your hard-earned money in exchange for some of those records (I'm fairly certain nobody more did than yours truly), the standard logline on Berlin's Modeselektor ("electronic + hip-hop fusion") might be enough to give you the involuntary shivers. Truth is, though, these guys have moments where they're so good at what they do that they practically redeem the concept altogether.
Modeselektor are Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary. Although Happy Birthday! is only their second full-length, they've been recording together in various capacities for almost 15 years, a period during which they've taken a number of different detours ranging from acid to glitch-hop to IDM to offbeat electro. In Modeselektor, all of those influences have come to rest and congeal into a well-articulated and slightly sinister-sounding whole. But what's interesting about Happy Birthday! isn't just that it fuses together the most unfashionable or discarded elements of electronic music's recent history, but that it manages to sound so fresh in doing so.
Longer and less twitchy than its superb 2005 predecessor Hello Mom!, Happy Birthday! finds the duo stretching out its legs a little more. Where that fidgety debut was a minor triumph of ADD-addled production, the songs on Happy Birthday! are allowed to breathe and settle into a groove. The unrushed tone means that some of them end up working as mini-genre exercises. Tracks like "BMI" and "Edgar", for example, bear all of IDM's finely articulated sonic details. Elsewhere, hip-hop tracks like the TTC-aided "200000" and the Puppetmastaz-aided "The Dark Side of the Sun" throw back to glitch's digitally blenderized vocals.
Ultimately, it's Modeselektor's fidelity to the low end that ties this record together. Where a lot of that old school glitch and IDM stuff was traditionally terrible with unimportant things like, you know, basslines and rhythms, Happy Birthday! pretty much bangs. From the stuttering almost-booty beat of "Hyper Hyper" to "Godspeed"s grinding synths to the fluttering ragga of resurrected oldie "Let Your Love Grow", this is a record made with the dancefloor as much in mind as the bedroom. (And, speaking of the bedroom, it's also worth mentioning that vociferous Modeselektor fan Thom Yorke turns up to calmly and casually outdo at least half of The Eraser with the lovely penultimate ballad "The White Light".)
If there's one criticism to be made of Happy Birthday!, it's to do with its length. 70+ minute records are increasingly difficult to justify in the mp3 age, and, of course, this one isn't without its lulls either. You also have to wonder how such a heroic show of ranginess will position Modeselektor in techno's increasingly specialized and splintered landscape. (One local London zine recently described them as "bassbin-blowing techno hop dubstep core" which is scenester for "fine, you file this" if I've ever heard it.) Ultimately, though, I guess those concerns are for Bpitch's marketing department. So much of this record sounds utterly thrilling coming out of the speakers that it seems silly to quibble over something as boring as taxonomy.
