In case you forgot, Smash still has jams for days. When Jackson Fourgeaud released his 2005 debut album as Jackson and His Computer Band after years of prodigious singles and hot-stove development, it was a delirious tangle of ideas that just got messier the more you tried to pull it apart. It was an agile mixture of glitch, electro, left-field hip-hop and early French Touch that was less a blend than a collision. Everything sounded like a remix of a remix of a remix of a seventh draft, the odd paradox of something so fussed over that it shuddered into chaos as some kind of survival mechanism. Yet you could still move to it despite its apparent disinterest in locking into an easy-fit groove. That his public work post-Smash was limited to a string of remixes by electro/house acts that could be considered his less-outlandish usurprers-- Justice (“D.A.N.C.E.”), Kavinsky (“Pacific Coast Highway”), Planningtorock (“Living It Out”) -- seemed, for a while, like one of dance music's more perplexing mysteries. What the hell happened to him?
Eight years later, Glow retains the same question but shifts its target-- not to Jackson's absence, but to the diminishing returns he brought with him when that absence ended. If there's one overarching flaw to Glow that covers all the little accumulated ones, it's that Jackson's genre-pastiche seams are starting to show a bit more. Instead of hacking pieces away from a solid block of beats to create something jagged and slippery to grasp, he comes up with a riff or a figure-- something easily identifiable as neo-new wave or caricaturized electro or half-hearted gabber-- and scuffs the surface a bit so it looks dingy. Not enough to be challenging or do anything surprising with its corrosion, but enough that it makes it difficult for his production to breather.
Worse still, it feels like he's spent so much time pulling remix duty that he can only find ways to channel his own sound through other artists' work. “Orgysteria” and its cheesily grandiose android-love ooze is a few Hz short of Air's 10,000. “Dead Living Things” is the mushroomy analog sludge of Black Moth Super Rainbow with an ill-advised Random Access Memories budget and a nasal falsetto whine that could use a dirtier filter or three. And the aluminum-rattling haunted house throb of “Pump” takes the giallo sensibilties of Justice's † and waters its art-horror aspirations down to third-rate direct-to-VHS splatter.
It gets worse. The unpleasant surprise of “G.I. Jane (Fill Me Up)”-- where gastric hoovers fill in for power chords, mock-Phoenix backbeats tick away rotely, and vocals are handled by a choir of distracted Mark Knopfler A.I.s-- doesn't work as either a sendup of arena indie or an embrace of it. And overdriven opener “Blow” and late-album churner “More” try to punk it up with quirky noise and noisy quirk, but can't stay focused long enough to keep their dopey momentum going before beatless interjections of droning synths let all the air out. Eclecticism and unpredictability used to be what made Jackson's work so exciting. But it's gotten so out of control that even the bits that almost work (“Seal” as bass-music flirtation; the swooning, dreamlike synthpop of the Classixx-ist “Vista”) still fail to come across integral threads in a new phase of his style. Instead, they feel like the pieces that stuck to the wall when he threw everything at it. I don't envy whoever has to clean up that mess.
