At the beginning of "Click Click", guest E-40 says, "MSTRKRFT, what is it doe," dwarfed by a maelstrom of pulverizing riffs that seem to come with their own laser show. What it is, for E-40, turns out to be something of an endurance test: Even the limber-tongued rapper struggles to assert himself through the breakneck pace of MSTRKRFT's power chords. It's like listening to someone trying to rap in a lightning field. This is a telling moment on an album that always seems to be shouting over itself, a tone that accounts for Fist of God's virtues and shortcomings alike.
Jesse F. Keeler still played bass and synths in Death from Above 1979 when he formed MSTRKRFT with producer Alex Puodziukas (aka. Al-P), which is now his primary endeavor. The transition represents Keeler gradually weaning himself off of rock, trading his bass guitar for various consoles and his dance-inflected rock music for rock-inflected dance music. Indebted to Daft Punk's vocal-infused robo-house, Justice's arena-sized stomp, and Vitalic's tooth-grinding tunnels of distortion, Fist of God has an metallic quality that doesn't falter even when riffage occasionally subsides, like on John Legend vehicle "Heartbreaker", where piano phrases seem wrought in gleaming chrome. More often, the tracks are comprised of loops caught perfectly between guitar- and synth-sounds. MSTRKRFT use delay, reverb, attack adjustments, and distortion to carve up these loops, reveling in quicksand bass and scintillating treble. At their most aggressive, the various strands of each track seem locked in mortal combat. "1000 Cigarettes" is like an electro-funk version of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", with Eddie Van Halen as Johnny and a Roland drum machine as the devil.
Fist of God improves on MSTRKRFT's first effort, The Looks, simply by jettisoning its omnipresent vocoder. If anything, it's too well-groomed, despite its wild-out vibe. There's a whiff of genre-exercise in the way strobe-light drum claps telegraph whooshing surges, vocal snips crisply striate each measure on the title track, and each contorting lick moves inexorably through real-time filter sweeps. With an ever-expanding collection of hardware and software, samples and sound banks, analog and digital synths, MSTRKRFT's sound is formally pristine, but a few stray hairs would lend it more character.
As it stands, Fist of God is a roundly enjoyable album with few highs and lows. A couple of the cameos are worthwhile: N.O.R.E.'s turn on "Bounce" suits the record's tone, and the track rates a prestige-bolstering remix on A-Trak's forthcoming mix album, Infinity + 1. Freeway is game and energetic on the alternate mix of "1000 Cigarettes", although he sounds rushed (and you can imagine how gnarly a track must be to rush Freeway), and Little Moe's deep-house diva turn on "It Ain't Love" holds up surprisingly well against the track's dot-matrix abrasion. John Legend's incredibly insipid lyrics about butterflies and rainbows don't do "Heartbreaker" any favors, but neither do they completely ruin it. It's a mystery why Jamal of soul-punk band the Carps warranted two guest spots, as both are profoundly anonymous.
And what the hell happened with "Word Up", the Ghostface collab? His warm-up chatter predicts a firebrand verse that never arrives-- instead, a couple of innocuous phrases ("word up," "do it hard") get cut up in uninteresting ways with clipped rave sirens and gymnastic synth-bass. You have to wonder if they got Ghost in the studio and then couldn't get anything worthwhile out of him, but you can't blame them for attempting to work with what they got-- would you pass up the chance to write "feat. Ghostface Killah" on your tracklist? In a way, this is representative of the album-- it's got all the right moves in place, but MSTRKRFT's handle on content is still slightly lagging behind their facility for tone and form. But if you're just looking for well-turned, rock-friendly, dance-party fodder, you could do a lot worse than Fist of God.
