I always knew there was a secret love lurking deep within the psyche of Death from Above 1979, a love they were afraid to expose to a world that just wouldn't understand. The scarves, the mountain of keyboards that they brought on tour but rarely touched, the remix album; all signs pointed to an inner desire to drop the indie-metal façade, to dispense with the chugging riffs and hyper-macho lyrics. Sure, noisy two-man bass-and-drums acts were what the kids wanted, but Death From Above could only live the lie for so long. They...just...gotta...dance!
OK, maybe those assumptions are only half-right, as thus far only bassist Jesse Keeler has fully given in to the seductive groove of dance, under the guise of his side project MSTRKRFT. Already glimpsed doing the remix thing on DFA79's "Sexy Results" and tracks from Wolfmother and Bloc Party, Keeler hinted at a desire to make rock/dance hybrids that would buck the fizzling trend of loose-limbed post-punk in favor of a more classically house-minded approach, albeit with the four-on-the-floor adorned with crunchy guitar rather than blippy synths.
To his credit, Keeler doesn't pander to DFA79 fans wondering where the guitars went: Drum machines provide the rhythms, keyboards color in the rest. Every vocal is slathered in vocoder, and lyrics use dancing to signify fucking and fucking to signify dancing (for entendre at its worst, see "She's Good for Business"). It's all a bit too directly filtered (no pun intended) through Daft Punk's Discovery, but there are plenty worse albums to emulate for one's side project.
In fact, MSTRKRFT so religiously adheres to the disco/house production instruction manual that the album sadly lacks an original twist that could've been scavenged from Keeler's background. Where DFA79's hard-rock singing could have added much-needed edge, the vocoder is instead omnipresent, and while it occasionally adds cybernetic charms to a track like "Work on You", the instrument is largely used to cover up lifeless, leering vocal melodies like "Bodywork" and "Easy Love". The sampled guitar-riff drops that made some of Romance, Bloody Romance's better remixes studies in electronic vs. rock dynamics are hardly employed on The Looks, even though the sound succeeds in rare moments like the rumbling "Paris".
Whereas DFA79 got considerable mileage out of the tension of playing dance-based music using the weaponry of hard rock, MSTRKRFT isn't conflicted enough to warrant more than a shrug. Keeler succeeds in meticulously reconstructing the electronic music he clearly has a taste for, but without stirring in any of his own personality the songs do little more than run in place, joylessly hitting the marks without changing the rules in any meaningful or attention-grabbing way. Just as a little repression can make a person's behavior that much more interesting, so too could MSTRKRFT's sound benefit from being a bit less in touch and open with Keeler's formerly-hidden inner desires.
