This may be a difficult concept for you Dream Theater fanatics to grasp, but most of the time people aren't examining the finery of musical content as much as searching for something that simply captures the right tone. You can try to persuade me that tech-house is all in the details, but in a genre rife with strict guiding principles, Cologne-based singer-producer Michaela Dippel (aka Ada) is defiantly preoccupied with melody, a priority she uses to her iconoclastic advantage. She might be tech-house's version of the Strokes: Her new album Blondie is simple but slyly detailed, and exudes a self-assured cosmopolitan vibe.
Part of Blondie's success is due to Dippel's preference for a soft, steady kick drum, which gives her beaming melodies a lot of wiggle room. And she uses it: Like the works of many of her Cologne cohorts, everything gets chopped and transmogrified before being spit out. But Dippel is generally more direct than her peers; Blondie throbs with classic hooks, laid out in gushing aurora synths and purring vocals.
"Eve" carries the album in on a wave of smooching synth beams, incorporating vocals before closing with a chirpy, fragmented faux-guitar solo. The song's approximation of a vocal hook is a slinky bit of bait: "Close your eyes and wet your lips," Dippel sings, slipping in and out of various filters and harmonizations. "The Red Shoes" features a distorted animal cry, which-- along with a thumping bass line and shimmying dot-matrix squelches-- pins the song nearer Boards of Canada than Luomo. The track even delivers a chorus-- a set of pulsing, "Drop It Like It's Hot"-style synth changes that explode out of the bare, steely beat.
If you're impatient, the album's middle third may seem bleak. But Blondie thrives on delayed pleasure, consistently turning hazy, going-nowhere beats into radiant climaxes. Most of the songs take a good four or five minutes to flower, but the finished product is almost always gratifying. Even the erratic seven-minute "Our Love Never Dies" recovers from a turbulent, tempo-less synth solo to find a viscous beat, which is slowly set aglow by a layered melody. "Each and Everyone", a remix of 2002's sensational A-side "Blindhouse", is the album's sparest, most orthodox moment; deriving clarity from Dippel's vocal and an icy bell-like melody, the track sounds like a decaffeinated Junior Boys.
Ada ends Blondie with a whirl of dizzying pop-- her cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps". Stretching and slowing the song's already austere melody, Ada proves the power of blushing sustained synth notes. Atop a more deliberate, broken-down melodic foundation instead of the original's bulldozer drumming and glowstik guitar line, the song's beautiful vocal takes on even greater tenderness. Karen O might be a hipster dream, but Ada is all dark sophistication. Her coy vocals and supple melodic sensibilities make it hard to hear Blondie and not walk away woozy and a little weak-kneed.
