Tech-house dub artist Alex Kruger is getting his share of attention, despite his confusing tendency to record under countless radar-eluding aliases. For his two full-length 2001 excursions, Kruger selected his Dub Taylor mask and attempted to grab some of the glory surrounding minimal maestro, Matthias Schaffhauser. Detect, Kruger-as-Taylor's second full-length in 2001, is more of a compilation than Forms and Figures, the other 2001 album Kruger released for Raum-Musik.
Because of the speed at which Kruger creates his tracks, Detect doesn't sound like a fits-and-starts hodgepodge of an assembly. But it doesn't sound like a winner, either. When compared to other similarly inflected artists, the music Taylor rolls out is commonplace and merely functional-- the title track, for example, is merely a serviceable and crunchy rendition of the glitch-dub house that's characterized the Chain Reaction label for the last five years. Yes, Kruger's concession to innovation is restricted to a punchy bassline and slightly click-hop-derived percussion.
"Sweet Lips" is the first vocal cut on Detect, and like the album's other four sing-songs, it suffers from a want of melody. Vocal house cuts, by my reckoning, should be hummable euphoria. And "Sweet Lips," while vaguely memorable, is hampered by a clumsy lyric about wanting "your sweet lips on mine." In a club setting, and after five pints of lager, such things might not bother me. But at home, I get to choose the music and it wouldn't hurt this song's rotation to be a little more interesting. "Observer" is a tougher version of the opener and sounds as though a tribally elated Danny Tenaglia or sleazy funked Richard Morel had embraced the white-noise dub of Berlin.
"Newman" sinks the listener deep beneath an ocean of echoes where Lee Perry trades rhythmic jabs with Moritz von Oswald's Rhythm and Sound project. With vocals by Per Fourier, "Something Somewhere" and "Our Youth" launch you back to bassbin-serrating tech-house. "John Wayne" is not an homage to the Duke that I had expected, unless Wayne was really a k-hole queen who loved to squirm his butt-cheek-exposing leather-chaps into the nether regions of dancers around him.
"I Can't ("...You Know)" is the closest Kruger has had to a recognizable club tune. He combines his woofer-worrying basslines with delicate Fender Rhodes noodling. Fourier unmemorably joins in with a lyric about not being able to fall in love with anyone but some dark-eyed temptress who's made off with his heart. I'd love to hear a vocal-less version, as Kruger uncuts Fourier's blankly delivered vocals with what sounds like a battling Eric Dolphy bass clarinet. Then, Detect concludes with "2scale," in which Kruger returns to his roots with the kind of echoing dub space that's influenced so much of European techno for years. As such, the record adds little new to the style, but hardly disgraces it either.
