Luke Vibert is a man who warrants our sympathy. Whereas most geniuses only have to maintain one momentous reputation at a time, Vibert has gotten himself embroiled in the renown of Plug, Wagon Christ, Amen Andrews, and himself. When this guy dies, he's going to receive ten obituaries on the front page of the Times. On YosepH, his first album for Warp, Vibert is torn between the traditional and the modern, pure nostalgia and the removed eddying of experimentation. The album makes a conscious attempt to burrow into the glitzy, wondrous world of classic acid house and the infamously resonant and bouncy modulations of the Roland TB-303, a machine basically responsible for most of the house and electro of the last twenty years. This is, of course, not necessarily a positive attribute.
The problems with reminiscences in techno have been distributed as copiously drawn 700-page schematic tomes elsewhere. For now, it will suffice to say that: 1) Acid house has not existed long enough for us to feel any nostalgia yet; and 2) Anyone who's ever heard anything from The Belleville 3 knows this is like being nostalgic for industrialized hyper-android flying-trains Futureland 2100. There are a lot of things to be nostalgic for; the future is not one of them. Navigating these predicaments, Vibert gets caught up in the 303 mentality: the record is named after acid tests, the track titles are "Synthax", "Countdown", and "ILoveAcid", and the record sounds like, well... it does not sound like the neighborhood church's youth organization.
Much of the album seems to have been entirely composed of snorting, spitting, and dehydrating. "ILoveAcid", the album's pièce de résistance (for better or worse), accumulates patches of sirens and robo-bong hits to underscore a vocoder that, none too subtly, relates its analytically derived position on lysergic acid diethylamide (or maybe just music): "I love acid and the way it makes me move... I love acid. I can feel it in my dreams." "Countdown" is all brushing and salivating, hocking gobs of crystal meth out over fizzling mission launches and at least four full tracks of clapping. The countdown, pricelessly hilarious, goes from "Ten. Nine. Eight." to "Zinc. Blacnh. Redweke. Six. Six. Easy."
For all Vibert's work on sedatives and therapeutic madcap acid flashbacks, YosepH also contains some of his most debauched and bewitching hip-hop since Wagon Christ's Tally Ho!-- gat-brandishing, ice-shoveling beats that are more imperturbably confident than MTV's Rich Girls and twice as dangerous. On "Noktup", the album's standout track, atmospheric clanging abruptly merges into a 24-hour hip-hop factory, a mechanical lever imprinting the heaviest beat of our times straight onto our foreheads. Two melodic synths are running the operation, and then they start falling behind, Lucy-in-a-Chocolate-Factory style, until the track submits to what sounds like a bunch of gun clips being loaded. All in all, the finest techno song to ever faithfully express the impetus behind Communism.
Throughout, the sensation is of a flawless incorporation of Vibert's patented vertiginous melodies and crisp rhythms into the soul of acid house and early hip-hop. Still, it's not imperceptible. Your enjoyment of YosepH is fundamentally related to how much you can stand those two genres or Vibert's earlier work. There's not enough here to sway you one way or the other, nor enough endeavoring to want to make acid house palatable to someone senselessly resistant to it. However, there is one track ("Slowfast") that suggests a reason as to why Vibert has found refuge in the past. Disconcerting at first, it becomes apparent that the part where the beat skips is the beat; the rhythm consists entirely of that rhythm being interrupted. It leaves one with the impression that, on the rest of the album, Vibert is so far ahead of the game that he's back to where he started.
