Despite being the butt of many a joke during its salad days, the "bad thriller" has become a topic of serious scholarly debate. Dissertations and books have been devoted to the potential feministic undertones of movies like Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Carol Clover's Men, Women and Chainsaws (1993)-- one of the premiere works on the subject-- posited the notion of a so-called Final Girl in slashers as a bastion of feminine righteousness. According to Clover, while all the other tramps are getting hacked during or following a casual sexual encounter, Final Girl abstains from illicit behavior, and ultimately avoids death. Our heroine is cloistered, bookish, and androgynous-- in short, a shameless feminist stereotype.
But well-intentioned or not, slasher films are often crass and inelegant-- and, as the adage goes, it's not what you say; it's how you say it. Fortunately, Bad Thriller-- the third album from French synth-hop daemons Abstrackt Keal Agram-- possesses more urbanity and verve than almost anything in the slasher canon. One thing Bad Thriller shares with its namesake film genre is a homespun, low-budget aesthetic. And the three-note acoustic guitar arpeggio and conjoining synth melody at the beginning of its title track sound hauntingly like a prelude to a gory murder-- but that's where the similarities end.
While Abstrackt Keal Agram's previous full-length, Cluster Ville, dwelt in dour monotony, Bad Thriller is a sufficiently more upbeat affair, featuring a handful of radiant melodies (case in point: M83's remix of AKA's song titled for Grandaddy's frontman, "Jason Lytle"). And while songs like "Street Lamp Confessions (Ghost Version)" and "Yo, Rap!" affirm Abstrackt Keal Agram's penchant for angular beats and turntable stylings, the group's addition of fragile acoustic guitars to their craggy synthscapes, adoption of a more diverse approach to songwriting, and tendency to sing (in often hushed vocals) as often as they rap make this album more well-rounded than its predecessor. "Delta Force", in particular, shows the sophistication and hopefulness missing from Cluster Ville: After a gloomy, disjointed opening section-- over which guest vocalist Poor Boy slurs double-tracked vocals like, "When you wake up, you feel so tired/ Destroyed by the rules of time"-- the song performs a sly turnabout with gorgeous synth glides augmenting a subtly mutating guitar harmony. This song, like most of the LP's others, features discernable parts and complex evolutions, rather than just cascading instrumentation atop a stagnant rhythmic loop.
Bad Thriller's liner notes feature Abstrackt Keal Agram's name graffiti'd on a trucker hat, but their music is a novel reconciliation of old-school beatmaking and modern synth-pop in refulgent 32-bit color. Although the album packs an overwhelming number of ideas into a scant 36 minutes-- and occasionally feels thematically and stylistically disjointed-- Abstrackt Keal Agram have vastly improved upon their prior outings. And the fact that these songs were all written and recorded late last year-- immediately following the release of Cluster Ville-- means the improvements came quickly. In my Pitchfork review of Cluster Ville, I tagged Abstrackt Keal Agram "the hyperkinetic little brothers of the Gooom Disques roster." Here, their undying enthusiasm has served them well-- and every indication is that they'll only get better.
