The classics kid in me craves noble grandeur-- craft-happy shit with more than meets the rods and cones, less is always more (except with clothes), suggestive-seductive vs. the once-off gunfuck. Full-on body music's great, sure, but so is porno, and with that shit I'd much rather wax new flesh than drag my stylus off the same old 10-second loop. Same time, Intelligent Body Music's as much a nightmare as Intelligent Anal, both a prefab excuse for pleasure-lack. So we're stuck in this immediacy=better rut, when really the best stuff cross-genre-- cross-platform, cross-media-- has instant funk, but with enough tricks for prolonged appeal.
Liking We Are Monster is easy. Isolée aren't bangers but they groove hard enough; melodies are pretty but most times we have to look for them (no lead vox or riff jihad per se). Tracks aren't afraid to be songs ("Face B"), and songs aren't afraid to be tracks ("Jelly Baby / Fish"). Everything's pleasant in other words, non-threatening like the cutesy-est Morr Music lullaby, but physical enough that you could get away with some great normal-person dancing. There are guitar sounds on a few tracks too, if that's important ("Today" sounds like "Do You Realize?"), and traceable horizontal A-->B trajectory in songs with actual movements and quantifiable progress. No need for all the "it's about size! it's about expansion!" apologies people make for their favorite loops.
As for loving this record-- letting it problematize itself with spins and learning to let it offend-- well, We Are Monster has the depth if you have the time. Yep, here's a fun record that's a work-for-it, in-the-details record, too. Behind the choked-vocals groove of, say, "Enrico" are countless micro-surprises (check how the kicks break down differently each turnaround, or how the downbeat finally drops deceptively mid-bar instead of on the loop's head), structured flips with chess-like anticipation (the guitar-like scratches function percussively at first, their color stuck in overtones until the song needs them in full), and avalanching momentum not from Isolée stuffing ideas half-baked, but from letting the seeds of lines grow, branch out, and tangle. Not sure we can talk of "Golden Age IDM" or even "Golden Age Techno" yet, but something like the Copeland-does-Glam gem "Schrapnell" seems so effortless, breathes so carefree, years from now crits might accuse it of sounding timeless-- maybe even of being so.
The rest of the tracks have their own self-revealing logic, obeying the beat but never in dependency to it. Honestly, you could drop the drum sounds off "Madchen mit Hase" and the song would still kill a floor, the rhythms of its composite parts boasting good spine, serving the melody before decorating the dancefloor. No gesture's incidental; the simplest blip plays for both a greater purpose and its own passing punchline. Even the second-trackiest number, "Do Re Mi", fronts a perplexing guitar jingle so it can alley-oop with drones of the same progression and a goofy italo-disco melody of 180-degree mood change, then the polar-opposite timbre. These songs are well-poised and well-developed and terrifyingly autonomous-- so much so I'm afraid they're no longer Isolée's anymore. On that note: Yeah, while I wish We Are Monster was an Album w/Overarching Concerns and Worldview, not just a Bunch Of Sweet Similar-Sounding Stand-Alone Tracks, I'm also convinced that in fact, a worldview is there, and probably an exciting one at that. I just haven't cracked one yet-- or just won't be able to.
