In the beginning, Gesaffelstein exuded cool. His synths oozed menace; his German-sounding alias was steeped in the perfume of Teutonic techno cred. Like Rick Owens’ slouchy draping, the French producer’s shadowy, slo-mo techno felt elegantly seedy, like a runway show in a back alley. But success has a way of defanging danger. After his work on Kanye West’s Yeezus boosted his profile, Gesaffelstein’s sophomore album, 2019’s Hyperion, came front-loaded with features like Pharrell, the sort of A-list cosign that the industry requires of a rising star. The louche swagger stumbled.
It’s hard to stick to your dungeon-techno guns with Haim on the track; it’s hard to remain stone-faced with the Weeknd singing about fucking with the lights on. Where Gesaffelstein’s debut felt effortless, Hyperion scanned like the work of a guy who was trying too hard to fit in at the big kids’ table. (Turned out Gesaffelstein, real name Mike Lévy, was not immune to corniness: His alias was meant to shoehorn “Gesamtkunstwerk” into “Einstein,” as in Alfred—overstuffed references stretched by juvenile overreach into the portentous portmanteau.)
GAMMA, then, comes as a happy surprise. Instead of trying to be cool, Gesaffelstein has plunged headfirst into camp. Glowering, industrial-grade techno is largely a thing of the past. In its place, he gives us a winking amalgam of overdriven synth-pop and vintage rock’n’roll. Seventies electro-punks Suicide and their French contemporaries Doctor Mix & the Remix, as well as synthabilly acolytes like the Jesus and Mary Chain and Love and Rockets, are obvious influences on Gesaffelstein’s distorted circuits, throbbing arpeggios, and motorik grooves. Lévy’s analog-rooted sound design has always been one of his strong points, and his synths have never buzzed as vigorously as they do here. Filters howl, lasers zap, and distortion builds like a tea kettle about to blow. The whole album’s a riot of squelch and clang.
Depeche Mode—an act that knows a thing or two about turning high camp into stadium-filling pop music—cast an even longer shadow. That’s thanks in part to the Some Great Reward-esque accents that litter the record like so many tarnished lug nuts, glassy FM tones suggesting the steely clank of chains. (Idea for a great safe word: “Yamaha DX7.”) But it’s due even more to singer Yan Wagner, GAMMA’s lone vocalist, whose oily baritone lubricates six of the record’s 11 tracks. In “Hard Dreams,” his leering, bluesy singsong sounds like an armored-up homage to Dave Gahan at his leather-trousered toughest. In “The Perfect,” which does for AI what “Behind the Wheel” did for B&D, he actually sings the phrase “behind the wheel.” Much of the Depeche Mode worship is equally Lévy’s doing: The instrumental “Tyranny” taps into the same 6/8 shuffle that “Personal Jesus” borrowed from T. Rex.
But Wagner is never reducible to a mere Gahan impersonator—he’s too funny for that, too unpredictable. Some of the eccentricity comes down to his lyrics. In the opening “Digital Slaves,” he ties his vocal cords up in elastic knots as he sings deranged lines like “Bring out the fun jump in the void…I’m gonna have fun with the digital scums,” or speak-shouts a chorus of “Cars! Coolers! Color! TV!” In “Your Share of the Night,” he groans, “Grunting in euphoria/This place is like a big mouth/Wading in the mire/The field roams with million diseases,” like Cronenberg and Google Translate gone horribly wrong. Such zany moments are the album’s best. “The Urge” pivots in its final 30 seconds from a Liars-esque industrial pogo to a Phil Spector slow dance; the way that Wagner purrs “Yeeeeeah” over the Moogy doo-wop of “Lost Love” is a sinister chef’s kiss atop a towering swirl of poisoned whipped cream. And “Hysteria,” a white-knuckled instrumental, is a perfect miniature of thrashy ersatz punk. At less than two minutes long, it’s one of GAMMA’s two shortest tracks, but nothing here runs much longer, which contributes to the album’s considerable charm. In place of some inflated falderal about total artworks and the life of the mind, Gesaffelstein has whittled his music down to a much simpler essence: thrusting hips, sharpened hooks, and a tongue pointedly in cheek. It ain’t E=MC2—and that’s the whole point.
