It’s no slight against Impossible Star, the first album by electronica innovator Jack Dangers’ Meat Beat Manifesto in nearly a decade, to begin this review by outsourcing it to another critic: my six-year-old daughter. “My favorite part is that it doesn’t just sound like one thing,” she said after listening to the album on a lengthy car ride. “Some songs are creepy, some songs are funky. I like that.” Who could disagree? The delights of a good Meat Beat record—a magpie approach to collecting sounds, combined with a tasteful precision in arranging and deploying them—are apparent even to a child’s ears, and Impossible Star is a very good Meat Beat record indeed.
Meat Beat Manifesto debuted with 1989’s Storm the Studio, a furious onslaught of gigantic beats, dizzyingly dense samples and barking agitprop from then-vocalist Jonny Stephens. Its influence on the industrial-dance scene of the day was major, and it sounds as savage as ever to contemporary ears. MBM’s subsequent releases have ranged through a dozen or so beat-oriented subgenres, sometimes all at once, slowing down after 2000 as Dangers’ eclecticism developed greater focus. All of these efforts sounded sincere, though some (his turn leading a full-fledged jazz quartet on 2005’s At the Center) made for more successful entertainment than others (his incorporation of dubstep wobbles and drops on 2008’s Autoimmune and 2010’s Answers Come in Dreams.)
Impossible Star, then, is a proverbial return to form. While less bombastic than Dangers’ ’90s albums, many of which came strapped with absolute banger singles (“Asbestos Lead Asbestos,” “Radio Babylon,” “Helter Skelter,” “Acid Again,” etc.), it evokes their wide-ranging combination of macabre moodiness, driving dance beats and playful aural collage, all while sounding surprisingly contemporary. Its prevailing sound is a blend of Tim Hecker’s fearful noise and Kieran Hebden’s shiny, happy studio wizardry, from an artist who predates them both and long ago recognized the thrilling emotional and intellectual power of that combination.
The album’s opening quartet of tracks displays these strengths concisely enough to serve as an introductory-level Meat Beat 101 course. “ONE,” the kickoff, begins with a quiet voice uttering the title precisely one time, giving way to several minutes of ominous, vibrating electronic gongs and tones, with dimly audible murmuring in the background. The next song, “Bass Playa,” juxtaposes a skittery dancehall beat and bassline with spaced-out “ahhhhs” and a high-pitched, head-nodding hook. The jittery “We Are Surrounded” takes its title from a vocal sample in which a man with an unplaceable accent warns against “liars” and “deceivers” through a haze of radio static. Finally, “Unique Boutique” creates a pummeling mid-tempo rhythm around the robotic repetition of the titular nonsense phrase, leaving the impression that the song was made just for the sheer silly joy of it.
Elsewhere, the title track wedges a stentorian sample of the phrase “PEACE IS THE WORD” (you hear it in all caps) with Dangers’ ghostly, pessimistic, vocoder-processed response: “It’s impossible.” The album’s emotional high point is “T.M.I.,” a dub-bass-driven trip-hop composition reminiscent of MBM’s gloomiest ’90s work. “Too much information/It’s gotta go away...Misinformation is all we’re gonna get now,” Dangers sings, his echo-shrouded voice sounding increasingly worried with each repetition. It’s an astute lament for our bullshit-overload era. But MBM’s long history of sampling from Space Age sci-fi and Atomic Age “this is only a test”-type assertions has always been about demonstrating that our civilization’s norms are anything but normal. If any artist was poised to make a comeback in the time of “fake news” and “bot armies,” it’s Jack Dangers.
Impossible Star closes with “The Darkness,” its title rendered ironic by a perkily staccato beat and soaring, spacey melody. It’s the album’s most optimistic song—the sonic inversion of the dour, unsmiling face staring at us from the album artwork. The contrast is fitting. After all these years, Dangers has earned the confidence to cheerfully plumb whatever depths he chooses.
