Berlin has a well-deserved reputation for producing aggressively tasteful minimal techno but it also has a warmer, more human side that doesn’t often attract the same level of attention. At the forefront of that scene are Apparat (aka Sascha Ring) and Modeselektor (the duo of Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary), and their 2009 album as Moderat was a massive, supergroup-level event for a very, very particular kind of electronic music fan.
After several productive years apart, the trio has reconvened for a second full-length. Four years is a long time in the fast-moving dance music world (more than enough time for whole genres to bloom, wither, and die), but Ring, Bronsert, and Szary have picked up pretty much exactly where they left off. The major differences between II and their self-titled debut is that their sonic sensibilities have grown more refined and compelling, and that the world has just about caught up to them.
Luckily the album’s weakest moment comes early on, and is therefore quickly dealt with. “Bad Kingdom”, II’s first song after a brief intro, has a wicked instrumental bed with a sparse breakbeat drum part and growling sawtooth synths-- if it had been released a few months earlier, Kanye might have sampled it on Yeezus somewhere. But it’s topped by a vocal that’s afflicted with the kind of generic Euro-soul inflection that American ears have a hard time dealing with, and the juxtaposition between the aggressive synths and airy pop vocals weakens the former rather than creating an interesting contrast.
Things pick up after that. The trio seem intent on exploring (and blurring) the line some electronic music fans draw between “dancefloor listening” and “headphone listening.” They favor unhurried tempos, and tend to emphasize texture over melody, but it’s not simply chill-out music either. “Let in the Light” runs at considerably lower BPM than the average peak-hour banger, but the echo-laden-yet-punchy drums, swelling synth chords, and a far stronger vocal melody than the one on “Bad Kingdom” make it easy to imagine how it could provide an amped-up crowd going off to it if the right DJ was daring enough to drop it in a mix.
The album peaks right around its midpoint with the track “Milk”, which over 10 minutes evolves from the barest rhythmic sketch embellished with a few ambient sounds into an swarm of pulsing synths drifting in clouds of white noise, the whole time repeating one brief melodic line that somehow gets more compelling the more it repeats. It lacks the hard edges and aggressive drive that most big-room rave anthems are built from, but it’s still precisely engineered to produce the same kind of world-shaking late night epiphany.
Moderat was a peculiar sounding album at the time. Outside of dubstep and a burgeoning drum & bass revival, breakbeats weren’t really in fashion, and some of the songs were structured like pop songs and boasted pop vocal parts but were still sonically rooted in the sounds of the electronic fringe. Since then a two-step renaissance has bubbled up out of the remnants of the underground dubstep scene and spread throughout dance music, and as pop radio moves increasingly EDM-ward listeners have made weird synthesized sounds de rigueur in the mainstream. So II is just about perfectly synchronized with the zeitgeist, and if it’s not a flawlessly executed record, it still seems capable of making the most out of its moment.
