You'd be excused for reading the descriptor "tribute to the music of Chicago's South Side" flown under the banner of a name like Thug Entrancer and, I don't know, shaking your head slowly and knitting your brow, maybe letting out a huff of annoyance. That the musician born Ryan McRyhew started out on a more IDM tip, moved to Chicago from Denver a couple years ago, then moved back out a couple years later, bringing an evangelical enthusiasm for old Trax Records 12" classics back with him? That's the way a lot of super-suspect appropriation nightmares start.
But that's also how a lot of engagingly weird cross-genre works happen, and Thug Entrancer's full-length debut album Death After Life—his breakthrough release on Daniel Lopatin's Software label—is more definitively a bold experiment than a cheap jack move. McRyhew's context has always been that of the generation that grew up with the idea of digital music as a normalized way of making things, from formative Mario Paint experiences onwards. So when Death After Life touches on a blend of styles, it comes across less like a cultural lift and more like someone finding a new element to add to the periodic table of beats.
It's tempting to call what Death After Life does "microjuke," at least in its more obvious moments. The focus cut, "Death After Life I" (all eight non-bonus cuts follow the title + roman numeral format), fits that descriptor most readily, spilling its footwork guts out with a stripped-down, chromed-out flourish and making sure the drum patterns are as frantic and agitated as the synth washes that act as de facto melody are floaty and light (if occasionally distorted to subtly unnerving did-I-just-hear-that? effect). The way McRyhew builds a beat comes across like an overflow of ideas, as if the opportunity to toy with the rapidfire snares, claps, and kicks of juke rhythms opens up so many variations he can't help but leap from one to another, chopping the one into fractions and shuffling it around like a blackjack dealer's cards.
Juke isn't the only ingredient in Death After Life, though—McRyhew puts his work together like somebody who spent decades listening to Roland-powered music and, finally given the chance to make some of his own, goes all shopping spree with it. So there's a thread running through this record that actually does juxtapose some of Chicago's core styles—not just juke and footwork, but ghetto and acid house, bracingly put through the wringer on "III" and "V". Granted, he's stripped out some of the crucial elements that make the material that inspired him so vital—with sparse exceptions, it doesn't push the BPMs to the 150-160 mark, and good luck finding an actual vocal sample anywhere on here—his ear for pitting the kind of slow-build chord progressions usually found in more ambient and minimalist works against that sort of dense rhythmic syncopation is well-tuned.
Death After Life gets a little cute here and there (cf. the extended roboseizure freakout outro to "III"), and it starts to lose a little steam near the end, when the downtempo digression of "VI" and the hopped-up yet unsurprising "VII" roll towards the official conclusion. The QED of "VIII" pulls out every genre-Cuisinart trick in Thug Entrancer's book to strong effect, and the bonus tracks of "Ready to Live" parts 1 and 2 show what he can do with his focus elsewhere—turns out he can get just as rhythmically berserk with neighbor-alienating bass hits as he can with drum elements. Whether this infatuation with the sounds of the South Side are a passing phase or a legitimate connection remains to be seen, but it's clear there are plenty of places Thug Entrancer can take it. And if Ryan McRyhew is a dilettante, then hey, looks like sometimes even dilettantes hit on something.
