Gaslamp Killer has emerged as a producer who developed his charismatic notoriety by pushing his corner of bass music into a something resembling a close cousin of acid rock. His highest-profile production gig, Gonjasufi's 2010 album A Sufi and a Killer, was psychotropic hip-hop at its most elemental, stuff so gristly and eye-peeling-- and occasionally beautiful-- that it reset the parameters for what you could nod your head to (assuming you could still remember where it was located). Pick up that same year's Death Gate EP or jump back a year to his 2009 EP, My Troubled Mind, and you can hear that sound emerge from a mindstate reared on 1980s VHS horror, hippy-biker exploitation soundtracks and car-trunk g-funk, stuff that expanded on the Left Coast underground influence of '96-era Shadow and Automator into a red-lit grindhouse. And it becomes even clearer soaking on a mix like 2009's Hell and the Lake of Fire are Waiting for You!, one of the best documents of his persistent efforts as a DJ to turn clubland crate-digger culture into an altered-state travelogue worthy of his Low End Theory bonafides. Flipping Dungen, Can, and space-age 70s European production library music in the same set as Smif N Wessun and Organized Konfusion is exactly the kind of approach that makes running in the same crowed as Flying Lotus and Teebs sound like a natural destination in context.
Breakthrough is a record that fits Gaslamp Killer well as a rundown of everything he's been able to imprint on his career so far. It's a run of occasionally disorienting, sometimes frantic, usually unnerving trips into distinct corners of psychedelic and experimental influence that spark briefly to reveal vivid life and fade out just as quickly. And it succeeds, driven as it is by up-front, iron-fisted live drumming that's mixed up into the red. He builds around that neck-snap percussion in ways that dredge up an air of constant tension, ebbing and flowing through so many different forms so quickly that it creates this air of unknowable dread; once it seems like there might be a consistent method to it, it switches focus to some other angle. Pick a style, and he'll coax out the most nerve-twisting elements of its abrasive side-- synthesized dirges that snap a wire and start sparking off into something noisier ("Meat Guilt"); Morricone panic attacks that sound purpose-built to soundtrack a splattery low-budget drive-in movie death ("Critic"); organ-driven garage funk given a stoner-metal lurch ("Dead Vets").
But calling Breakthrough the most direct line into Gaslamp Killer's singularly unhinged vision would be a bit misleading: As befitting an artist who's as important for who he's hung out with and given opportunities to as he is for what he's done on his own, this is a record that leads him to filter his ideas through a number of like-minded collaborators. Sometimes it's just a matter of finding the right piece to plug in: Miguel Atwood-Ferguson's keening strings pierce through the wall of synth-hesher fuzz on "Flange Face", Gonjasufi is his usual otherworldly presence on the spiritual admonishment of "Veins" and the outreach of "Apparitions", Daedelus incorporates touches of 8-bit vertigo into "Impulse", and Shigeto helps steer the percussive rattle of "Keep it Simple Stupid" through an analog squall that makes the title's advice sound a bit beside the point. And sometimes it's the collaborative aspect that actually drives the song itself-- Gaslamp Killer's heritage-driven enthusiasm for Turkish music, previously heard in tracks like My Troubled Mind cut "Turk Mex", is fleshed out with live instrumentation supplied by Amir Yaghmai on "Nissim".
So GLK's found a communal niche, all right, but how far deep has he worked himself in there? Because Breakthrough-- which it is and isn't-- feels like the kind of record his adventurous precedent has made into a familiar signature. It's the album that gets at his recent creative mode most definitively, the one people might figure he had in him rather than the one that changed anybody's minds about him. Which is good news, really-- expecting a dose of high-quality doom-struck instrumental hip-hop and getting it is the kind of thing only jaded fad-hoppers get disappointed over. The idea that it might draw more fans to his stylistic strengths means the potential for a subsequent breakthrough of Cosmogramma advancement can wait a bit. This one offers plenty to wrap your head around in the meantime.
