Feadz, aka Fabian Pianta, has been a longtime pillar of French house. He emerged in the late 90s alongside Mr. Oizo (whose excellent, deranged 1999 album Analog Worms Attack was a Feadz co-production), accompanied Uffie during her stint in the spotlight from "Pop the Glock" onwards, and put in work for both BPitch Control and Ed Banger, two of the most vital, tastemaking labels of the 00s. Throughout that time, he's managed to build a following as both an influential DJ and a jack-of-all-trades producer who can dabble in just about any corner of dance music there is.
If his full-length debut, Instant Alpha, highlights anything, it's the limits of how far mere dabbling can get a producer—especially if that artist tries to fuse all his limited tricks together. Instant Alpha betrays a sound that staples together the most immediate, surface-level pleasures of an accumulated jumble of styles and expects the in-your-face bits to prop up otherwise hollow-sounding tracks. Electro's Euro-slick decadence, trap's chest-out wildness, Southern rap's low-end throb, grime's raw low-budget futurism, house's lifeblood pulse, bass music's rhythmic elasticity—these ideas are all melted down and left to congeal on the counter, leaving a burnt yet cold pile of goo that sort of resembles a cursory club jam.
The main culprit is the impatient, almost assaultive way Feadz rolls out his beats. I say "beats" when a more accurate term would be tics—machine-gun kicks are shoved out into wide-open spaces where they're subjected to water-drip bloops, hyperactive stammering vocal snippets, strobing synthesizers that hiccup until they puke, and incessant empty-calorie hooks (like this unattributed winner from "Papercut": "I spit fire like I tongue-kissed a dragon"). The line between that kind of thing being big dumb fun and a big dumb headache is almost invisible, but with a whole lot of momentum-shifting jumpiness and not a lot of time to build organically and gradually to a crescendo—most tracks are less than 3 1/2 minutes—it all feels too anxious and bristly to soundtrack anything short of a mindstate aided by moon rocks and vodka, and even then it might sour your mood.
Want a florid description of how the music's supposed to make you feel? "The Purpose" has you covered there, as the distorted voice of TTC's Teki Latex relays the agenda of a man who sounds like a benevolent megalomaniac of a DJ ambassador: "Connecting minds together through an invisible network of vibrations, creating euphoric states, projecting childhood memories inside your brain, but taking you to yet unknown places." You'll also get a good sense of the sound via the list of obvious influences. For instance, "Electric Empire", featuring guest vocalist Kito, is a thematic hybrid of Daft Punk's roll-call "Teachers" and GZA's "Labels" wordplay ("It's a house without a home/ Uptown in 'Techno City'/ With Mo'Wax than you can think of in your Metroplex Fantasy").
There might be the occasional inspired rhythm track under all this mess—"Metaman" and "Eastside" at least prove that Feadz knows his way around an 808 (or a simulacrum thereof)—but it's nothing you can't get from countless other artists who choose not to bury those beats in over-the-top hyperactivity like a parodic attempt at the next "Harlem Shake". It's all signifiers and nothing signified, exploring the possibilities of cross-genre dance music the same way mashing an action figure and a Barbie doll together explores sex.
