Mux Mool's 2010 debut full-length, Skulltaste, held the promise of a whatever-works adventurer who could excel in just about any direction he was pointed. It was easy to assume after the fact that if Brian Lindgren focused on just one of his strengths-- Americanized French touch, fat-bottomed analog hip-hop, gauzy-yet-speaker-rattling downtempo ambient-- he could produce the next phase of a defining sound with real mutation potential. Planet High School narrows his scope and draws a more specific target, streamlining those aforementioned touchstones into a blend of synthesized airiness and thick bass that sounds a bit like g-funk for planetariums. But as with his best tracks, the common thread that runs through each song is a sense of restless metamorphosis, the sense that there's no use wearing out a good loop when there's plenty of space to throw it around.
There's a confident immediacy to the beats that initially drive them-- whether agitatedly hopped-up ("Raw Gore", "Cash for Gold") or floating at cruising speed ("Ruin Everything", "Palace Chalice")-- and Lindgren gives himself the space to jostle and upend their structures in freewheeling ways. There are so many rhythmic and melodic layers to each track that he often produces attention-getting dynamics just by fiddling with one of the elements, dropping in or pulling out a bassline's notes to shift momentum without losing tempo, or pushing a deceptively simple drum break into supple polyrhythms. It's not just about waiting for big drops or build-build-build-release catharsis; it's about constructing a track that ricochets inside itself, splits, regroups, and counteracts itself several times in just a few bars without once losing grasp of its own forward movement. It's undeniably danceable, but the pop-and-lock routines you could set to this might tear ACLs.
It's when Lindgren tries to accelerate too far into frenetic overload that things start shaking apart. There are only three cuts of 10 that let the works go spiraling uncontrolled into the grandstands, but they're pretty confounding, trading off manic glitchiness and bewildering juxtapositions that upend what could have been a more naturalistic flow. "Get Yer Alphabets (Guns)" is the grimiest, threatening bro-step wobbles and hiccup-spasm snares before settling on a warbly Squarepusher-ish bassline that doesn't quite lend itself to nuanced manipulation-- so it gets Benihana'd into an Adderall freakout instead. "Live at 7-11" sabotages its hypnotic, swooning funk halfway through for a series of drum'n'bass crescendos that border on non-sequitur, then peters into a woozy, tacked-on codeine keyboard coda. And "The Butterfly Technique" tries to do for lo-fi samples what the other tracks did for thick analog sounds, but if you can get past the stuck-doorbell intro and a frantic, piano-driven attempt to grasp on to some semblance of groove, you're still dealing with a pile-up of sounds that don't quite mesh. So maybe Mux Mool can't literally do everything-- but for the bulk of Planet High School, he's got himself an engaging something.
