"Welcome to Mu World, bitch!" Yep, welcome to Mu World, with open arms, broken English, and some pretty fucked-up "programming" (though I suspect Maurice Fulton is having a field day playing keyboard drums in real time). If you didn't get enough of that leftfield house the first time around, you're in the right place. Of course, Out of Breach (Manchester's Revenge), the American-Japanese-by-way-of-Sheffield duo's second full-length, doesn't sound like house most of the time-- but any genre name would fail to accurately describe this music. The only tag that's consistently useful is "six-minute," which roughly applies to the minimum amount of time Mu need to complete a great track-- "Paris Hilton" being the five-and-half-minute exception that just barely proves the rule. And I'm already exhausted trying to finish an intro paragraph about this record.
Unlike 2003's Afro Finger and Gel-- which seems even better now than when it was released-- Out of Breach is less suited for a fucked-up dance party than just for being fucked up. Fulton's tracks veer wildly-- from hard funk-rock, hi-speed go-go blast, and mutant disco to dominatrix electro-performance art soundtrack and what sounds like damaged Japanese game show music. And that has to be good, right? Well, it is, but I can't honestly say it has more great stuff than Afro Finger; rather, it's a tangential breed. Where that album might have been described as "weird" or "quirky," this one is "kind of disturbing" and "dark." These are hardly criticisms: Out of Breach is a different flavor of Mu, one that may very well make more sense to the experimental-centric listener, or even just the rock-centric listener. And there are jams here, but they're abstract and expressionist rather than weird and quirky.
Of course, you'd be forgiven for getting lost in the shuffle of said jams. I did, and while it lasts, it's a mother. After the confrontational (even for Mu) opener "Haters"-- punctuated by Psycho strings and big, fat rock drums-- Out of Breach runs through about half an hour of nonstop awesomeness. The title track is their best straight house foray, though with the horrific (read: perfect and amazing) echo-chamber ambience, android-monster vocals, and electronic gamelan backdrop, it's difficult to call it "straight" anything. Seriously, let this play for a while on repeat and watch the images blur. To pull themselves together, Mu unleash "Stop Bothering Michael Jackson" on me, with whirlwind bass line, brush-heavy (emphasis on heavy) drums and Mutsumi Kanamori's request to the stupid, dumb bitch who wants to make a fake story and won't leave MJ alone, "suck a dick!" And hmm, the drums just got all machine gun on me, and where did this wind machine come from?
"Tiger Bastard", "Throwing Up", and "Extreme" are all variants on Mu's secret weapon: mid-tempo funk-rock bordering on disco like DFA does disco-- think "Tell You Something" from Afro Finger. The first one brings out the congas and growling bass line to underscore Kanamori's string of curses, both at regular speed and drastically slowed down for added queasiness. In fact, "Tiger Bastard" reminds me of a song that should have been on the LCD Soundsystem album were it equipped to push as many buttons as Out of Breach. "Throwing Up", opening chorus of heaves notwithstanding, is a masterful hybrid of post-Stubblefield drum(-machine) acrobatics and house pump-- Fulton had to have been a drummer in his pre-Mu days. "We Love Guys Names Luke" doubles the tempo and invites the punk guitars and handclaps to make things a little bit more hectic, as if Kanamori's array of shrieks and vocoder-ized pronouncements weren't enough.
Maybe it's asking too much to keep up such a pace, but I could have done without relative "throwaways" like "So Weak People" and "Like A Little Bitch"-- the former being a bizarre, tic-tac take on a "Fever"-style jazz tune, and the latter being that short game show thing I alluded to earlier, all dadaist and retro-futuristic. That's also known as "goofy" in less verbose circles, and though I'm all for goofiness in doses, it kind of wrecks the apocalyptic flow on Out of Breach. Maybe that was the point, and it's not as if Mu come up short where nightmare jams are concerned. In any case, it's still easy to be fascinated by these people, and even easier to let the best parts of this record do what they will to me. If that makes me Mu's bitch, so be it.
