Few 21st-century house/techno tracks have proven as oddly influential as Vitalic's 2001 "La Rock" and "Poney Part 1". Released when microhouse's delicate sound-sculpting was being touted as dance music's future, and strangely first claimed by electroclash fans during that trend's brief and ignoble peak, Vitalic offered speaker-frying synth-riffs (or sometimes just synth-squeals) to scare off wannabe aesthetes and IDM refugees, reaffirming the productive struggle in post-acid dance between funk and floor-clearing noise. But as "Poney Part 1" and "La Rock" reared their ugly heads again and again, showing up on one compilation after another during the next three years with little new Vitalic material in sight, fans who valued humor and nuance as much as focused brutality may have wondered if producer Pascal Arbez had exhausted his one distortion-drenched trick.
So it probably helped Vitalic's long-term career prospects that his 2005 debut album, OK Cowboy, included enough oddities (like "Wooo", with John Carpenter subbing for the oompah band at a local polka night) and slow jams (like "The Past", a rare non-unctuous trawl through 1980s synth-pop romanticism) to keep John and Jane Doe from tuning out after the 10th consecutive helping of fuck-you. Which is not to say Monsieur Arbez wussed out in the name of crossing over. The fearsome "Poney"-alikes far outweighed the goofball interludes, and if he'd released his second LP 12 months later, his rep as middlebrow dance music's premier scourge would have been secured. Instead, another three years passed between OKC and Flashmob, a period during which a horde of noisy, uncouth producers (many of them fellow Frenchmen in the Ed Banger orbit) popped up, turning overblown feedback and digital grime into exhausting shtick in record time. With the landscape glutted with punk-dance nobodies, Vitalic's mission-- to create deranged, over-the-top dance music that nonetheless honors disco's body-moving tradition-- became that much harder.
If he succeeds, and Flashmob proves that he does, it's because Vitalic's best productions have a near-psychedelic sweep, a sensuous appreciation for the way he can overlap often grating textures until they become both beguiling and disorienting, while so many of his contemporaries are happy to strangle the details right out of their tracks with volume. Even if he's unerringly loud, his weakness for buzzsaw mid-range obliterating the dub-influenced sense of space you hear in the best minimal and deep house, Vitalic offers sublime, spaced-out moments as crucial punctuation in even his least compromising tracks. Opener "See the Sea (Red)" is undeniably dominated by the fat, fuzzed-out riff that takes the place of a traditional bassline, but Arbez knows said riff will flatten listeners all the harder when it rears back up after a twinkly, almost Kompakt-ian breakdown. Justice, by contrast, would just let the riff build and build until you're begging for relief that never comes. Arbez obviously appreciates this no-mercy approach, but realizes that what's effective on a lone 12" gets wearying when repeated a dozen times in an hour.
This contrast-- between short moments of catch-your-breath beauty and the violence of riffs on the edge of pure noise-- has proven to be Vitalic's greatest weapon. Perhaps that's why Flashmob's slower, more even-keeled tracks feel like filler. Necessary filler, but nonetheless. "Poison Lips" is fine as post-Italo/hi-NRG pastiche goes, but it's too streamlined, too emotionally flat to feel like anything other than an interlude that got out of hand. Ditto "Allan Dellon" and its slow-motion electro-house, where Vitalic proves he can do straight-up, classically synth-driven beauty well enough, while lacking the melodrama of Flashmob's obvious highs.
But you also sense that Arbez knows these tracks are glorified breathers, and has sequenced the album very carefully. For instance, following the relatively low-key and carefully sculpted vocoders of "See the Sea (Blue)" with "Chicken Lady", Flashmob's most unrepentantly thuggish moment-- three minutes of Arbez dragging his knuckles around his studio as his melody-spurning machines groan and growl. Taken individually, neither is a jaw-dropper, but in tandem they mimic the one-two punch of his best work. Little of Flashmob could be described as "tender," or even traditionally catchy, but Arbez has enough of a pop instinct to know that drama results only from careful pacing. He also knows that when you're making big, potentially dumb, and definitely unruly dance music, a sense of humor and a lack of pretension is crucial. It's hard not to laugh when a robot tells you, "This is your disco song, made for you, for those rain days, to chase the shadows away," over a backdrop of mock-menacing see-sawing synth-grind.
That's why the best track here is "Terminateur Benelux"; it squeezes everything Vitalic does well into four minutes, a summary of Flashmob's well-crafted, winking brutalism and my pick for a single-serving download for the curious. It's hilarious and a little terrifying all at once, an unhinged homage to early-90s hardcore rave, with a clattering quasi-breakbeat that sounds like it's agitated itself into a fit, sampled "woo!"s and "ah-ha!"s straight off a 2 Bad Mice single, and the kind of freaky Belgian techno drone-riff that's probably ground zero for Vitalic's sonic signature. Listening, you don't know whether to giggle, run for cover, or start breakdancing. Like those first-wave rave producers, Arbez wants to have it all: to make listeners smile, shake their shit, and still walk away a little shaken by the music's intensity. Flashmob pulls off this near-impossible combo with more skill than even Vitalic's fans may have expected.
