Eliot Lipp released his first album via Prefuse 73's Eastern DeVelopments label, where he was something of an odd man out-- in the context of Dabrye's and Daedalus's herky-jerky, obscurantist electro, his own smooth version seemed especially accessible. To my mind, this distinguished him from the more interchangeable contingent of instrumental hip-hop producers: a prototypical Daedalus track is about as sticky as an oil slick, but Lipp's indelibly outsized themes sear themselves into your brain. He's an unabashed crafter of bangers, with none of the stereotypical indie producer's crippling fear of transparency.
Lipp's as dependable as ever on The Outside, sequencing analog synths over kinetic breakbeats, and splicing his peripatetic influences-- vintage electro; Krauty Detroit club and Eurocentric filter-swept techno; jazzy undie-hop; brisk G-funk; decadent Sunset Strip glitz-- into anthem after swaggering anthem. The Outside could have easily comprised a continuous double-disc with 2006's Tacoma Mockingbird, except that it mixes up its purebred anthems with some IDM contortions. The uncomfortably titled "Baby Tank" refracts pop-industrial through a prism, while "The Machine and the Wind" is crystalline ode to sprung clockwork.
Lipp's music is catchy because it's repetitive, establishing an infectious melodic theme and grinding on it for three to five minutes. But it's engaging because it behaves unpredictably within this repetition: Lipp vamps on his themes through fugal variations and diverse FX sweeps. In the cosmopolitan jungle of the title track, he smears his robo-funk theme with acid-squelches and chokes it with sundry gargle effects so it whizzes around like a punctured helium balloon over the pimp-strutting low end. The mellower "Opening Ceremony" flips the script: here, it's the low end that distends and mutates, while the hovering synth clouds and pinging melody remain relatively constant, beyond the judicious introduction of some tooth-grinding ring modulator effects.
Lipp also keeps things lively by occasionally expanding his palette beyond toxic-sunrise Korg tones. "The Area" slips needling funk guitar and splashes of piano into its stylized neon squiggles, and "7 Mile Tunnel" hurls a delicately sliced voice amid the bumper-car synths. And his tonal range is admirable-- he can go mystical, as on "Beyond the City", which deploys trills of revelation (similar to those on Four Tet's recent "Ribbons') to terrific effect; he can go svelte and simmering, as on "The Meaning", whose ground-hugging synths lick and glimmer like small flames. He can flip a bassline so clipped and compressed that it sounds alien, or a bassline so rich and organic it sounds like someone humming. And he can do it all while feeding us exactly the unpretentious heaters we've come to expect from him.
