It's around 18 months since the New York-based duo Matthew Arkell and Aaron David Ross released the Giza EP under their Gatekeeper alias, positioning themselves as another act to ride one of the plentiful waves of 1980s nostalgia. That release was fixed as a dystopian electronic fantasia, which Pitchfork's Jess Harvell correctly placed somewhere between Cabaret Voltaire, Detroit techno, and Vangelis' bled-dry soundtrack to Blade Runner. Here on Exo, the duo's debut album for Hippos in Tanks, the fundamental Gatekeeper template has been stretched and tweaked, putting one tentative foot forward into the future while the other remains firmly rooted in the past. It's muscular and brutish, often gaining mettle from a Lords of Acid-style mesh of post-industrial density and Shoom-era acid house sounds. But there are other elements at work, including an adherence to playfulness, humor, and a rich seam of pomposity, all of which prevent it from becoming a straight-down-the-line exercise in po-faced replication.
There's an unashamed ambition that takes hold of Exo from its first few seconds and doesn’t let up until the last strains of the wonderfully over-the-top closer "Encarta" fade to black. Occasionally there's a sonic similarity to big beat in its prime, particularly when the twists of acidic synth bleed firmly into the red. But there's also a shared sense that all this work was deliberately mapped out in a gigantic space, where every last synth line and beat is designed to sound as "big" as possible-- a notion Gatekeeper share with acts like the Chemical Brothers in their prime. There isn't much room for subtlety and nor should there be-- "Exolift" and "Hydrus" find their weight from being gloriously dumb, driven by sledgehammer riffs that only increase in intensity as each track progresses. Even tracks that take more subtle turns ("Bog", "Pre-Gen") are propped up by an overwhelming feeling of grandiosity, lending a magisterial quality to the entire enterprise.
The media campaign for Exo matches the sense of aspiration that percolates throughout the LP, with special fonts released to decipher hidden messages, plus an as-yet unseen first-person gaming environment designed by Tabor Robak to help explore "various worlds inspired by the tracks on the album." Such ideas mirror the prog leanings the album sometimes buffers up against, although Exo is mercifully untethered from that world by its brief, 35-minute runtime. Gatekeeper never fully reach down into that environment in the same way Justice did on Audio, Video, Disco, instead choosing to take their rock cues from even more unlikely sources. "Encarta" is the kind of ludicrously grand musical gesture that would have Meat Loaf producer Jim Steinman beaming with pride, with its bombastic vocal chants leading the march toward a bedlam-fueled conclusion that bears more of a resemblance to a battering ram than it does to anything musical.
Ending Exo in such a supercilious way is a marvelous act of insolence, hopefully hinting at freshly brazen territories Gatekeeper can move into on further releases. It would certainly be better than the tendency this duo has for dipping a little too hard into the acid vaults. On "Encarta" they can overcome that by the sheer vigor of the other musical ideas, and occasionally that tendency does hit odd moments of inspiration-- the opening "Imax" pines for an era that's yet to pass, attempting to accelerate the nostalgia cycle by retro-frying the present-- but elsewhere their leap into the future is stunted by the past bearing down too hard on their coattails.
