I am writing this from the back porch of my mom's house, having stopped off to do my laundry, and it's pretty clear that spring has sprung. (Hell, given that a few days ago it was pushing 90 and humid as Bonecrusher's jockstrap, we may have skipped spring and gone straight to July.) The sky is a beautful, uh, sky blue, with only a handful of cottonball clouds dotting it. The leaves have exploded like paintball pellets against trees that only a few weeks ago were still bare. The bugs are hovering, somewhere in the distance a lawnmower is buzzing, and I am drinking lemonade. In short, it's exactly the opposite of the mood conjured by Superpitcher's new mix Today.
Superpitcher is house for mopers. He turns the dancefloor into one big pity party. Unlike other attempts at "goth house" (the brutalist Gallic bombast of Black Strobe or their forebears in EBM acts like Front242, for instance), he doesn't hammer you into submission like a camp Danzig hip to Derrick May. He sulks, like a scrawny teenager replaying "Computer Love" and "Neon Lights" over and over to soothe a broken heart. In his own tracks like "Heroin" and his remixes for artists like M83, he takes a trudging mid-tempo house pattern that seems to be pushing against its own inertia and pickles it in a brine of gloomy-yet-euphoric synths. Though Today contains only one of his own productions, it's definitely all of a piece. And if it doesn't contain individual tracks that hit the highs of Kompakt's previous goth-mix masterpiece, Michael Mayer's Immer, then as a mood muzik whole (imagine a train ride across the damp Germanic countryside) it's up there.
DJ Koze's "Let's Help Me" rustles and bustles along like the midway point between electrohouse and the uncomfortable intestinal intimacy of Jan Jelinek's Farben productions. (I especially like the really thin, almost slivered hi-hats.) The lyrics and luded Nico (not an oxymoron, I swear) delivery of Michael Mayer's "Lovefood" are so archly ridiculous ("give me love/ So I can/ Kill"...girl, please) that no remix can save it, except perhaps a total Aphexian overhaul. Triola's "Leuchtturm (Wighnomy's Polarzipper Remix)" squelches and chirps at uncomfortable (p)op-art angles, something like a Depeche Mode B-side in dub. The compulsive bassline of Oliver Hacke's "21:31" gets peeled back by the jacking drums of the Psychonauts' "World Keeps Turning (Highfish & Zander Remix)" with vocals straight out of '85.
The old school techno jock of Nathan Fake's "Dinamo" sets up the killer tune of the whole mix, the Wighnomy Bros' "Wurz + Blosee". The masters of creative thrift throw all their weight on a hypnotic b-line that maintains an almost unbearable tension simply by skipping up or down an octave after eight bars. There's a secondary beat they drop around 2:30 in, but mostly it's just the bassline, leading you around the dancefloor like a pied piper. Max Mohr's "Old Song" sounds like jazz house played on particularly rusty, rattling set of traps. Even faded-- like an old photocopy-- the shock of hearing something so traditional sounding on Kompakt is thrilling. (The matte synths that lurk in the back of the mix bring us closer to the Kpakt gold standard for wistful melodicism.) The chunky groove of Sebastian Tellier's "La Ritournelle" almost sounds like broken beat, albeit slower (and less broken). Soundtrack strings and AOR ballad pianos attempt to briefly rouse our spirits. I am glad someone remembered that everybody loves the sunshine.
