Amir Alexander is 42 years old, and Love & Fear is his debut album. A former Army brat who eventually settled in Chicago, Alexander has been DJing since 1993 and making music for nearly as long, but he only began releasing records around 2008. In that light, the cover image of a mountain climber scaling a snowy peak at a 45-degree angle has a slight autobiographical tinge: In electronic music, full-lengths always tend to constitute milestones, but for an artist like Alexander, who has made his name later than many, there's a palpable sense of raised stakes.
Appropriate for someone with such a deep and abiding investment in a scene, Alexander uses Love & Fear to contend with the legacy of American techno. Any attempt to extend that legacy raises questions: How do you evoke a classic sound when innovation was central to that tradition? Can you pay tribute to your roots without the music withering on the vine? Making do with the same sorts of synthesizers and drum machines that have dominated dance music for the past quarter-century, his response is to worry less about novel sound design and focus on his machines'—and his own—expressive capabilities.
One way he does that is to explore a far wider range of tempos than most. "A Virtuous Woman!" treads a strange, slow-motion path, stepping and strutting, as a scaly bassline ties itself up in writhing knots, and atonal bleeps suggest the ghost of Kraftwerk's "Numbers". The title track is even slower, with a stately synthesizer melody that braids itself around snapping, deliberate hi-hats and rimshots. Even sitting in your chair, you can tell that it's a track made for dancers, an invitation to move the body in different ways. "The Blues (Never Had)", even slower, offers the opportunity to get horizontal: smeared in jazzy chords, pitch-bent keyboard solos, and meandering vocals, it's a narcotic funk number, while "Tranquility Base!" dials up the tempo to footwork's high-flying range. It's woozier than most footwork, though, with tightly syncopated rimshots banging like a screen door in a storm, and hi-hats spinning like a wheel that can't get traction. "That's how I feel inside," sings a doleful voice, as chilly Juno pads voice even chillier chords, buzzing and bracing as an ice-cream headache. The only tranquility here is an overarching sense of numbness.
He also experiments with instrumentation—"A Child Is Born" pairs the chimes of '90s electronica with the fat, rich tones of a church organ—and with themes not often represented in techno. In "Nordisk Saga!", he looks north for inspiration and overlays his moody synths and sparse drums with a dramatic reading of a Nordic saga written by Cecilia Bruun Hansen, all crisp consonants and alien-sounding vowels and rolled "R"s, and references to Freyja and Ragnarok. He presumably got the idea from his time in Malmö, where he lives for part of the year. But given how often white European producers have appropriated African-Americans' voices—all those tracks made with Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, for instance—Alexander's Scandinavian gambit also amounts to a clever turning of the tables.
But at the root of Alexander's music is a simple knack for what makes sounds come alive, both on the dance floor and off. The three relatively straight-down-the-middle techno/house cuts here are among the most immediate, attention-grabbing work he's produced yet, although none of them quite nail the spooky transcendence of 2013's "Don't Go". In "Tight Situations", carefully deployed dissonance sends chills down the spine, and he shows off his arranger's chops with counterpoints that sneakily keep evolving. "Moist Flesh!" is a warm bath of swelling pads and playful plucked leads. And the crowning glory of it all is "Komm, süßer Tod, komm selge Ruh!", which takes its title from one of Bach's 69 Sacred Songs and Arias. The bassline takes the form of a gnarled, shape-shifting throb; the background swirls with metallic chirps; and as the track patiently unfolds, it gives way to a wild, psychedelic cadenza reminiscent of one of Prince's guitar solos. "Come sweet death, come blessed rest," is the translation of the title, and the song's graceful chord changes echo the sentiment, faintly. But that solo tells another story; there's too much struggle in Alexander to stop here. That peak on the album cover will be scaled, come hell or high water.
