To start with, Gesaffelstein exuded cool. His synths oozed threat; his German-sounding alias used to be steeped within the fragrance of Teutonic techno cred. Like Rick Owens’ slouchy draping, the French manufacturer’s shadowy, slo-mo techno felt elegantly seedy, like a runway display in a again alley. However luck has some way of defanging threat. After his paintings on Kanye West’s Yeezus boosted his profile, Gesaffelstein’s sophomore album, 2019’s Hyperion, got here front-loaded with options like Pharrell, this kind of A-list cosign that the business calls for of a emerging famous person. The louche swagger stumbled.
It’s onerous to stick with your dungeon-techno weapons with Haim at the observe; it’s onerous to stay stone-faced with the Weeknd making a song about fucking with the lighting on. The place Gesaffelstein’s debut felt easy, Hyperion scanned just like the paintings of a man who used to be making an attempt too onerous to slot in on the giant youngsters’ desk. (Became out Gesaffelstein, actual title Mike Lévy, used to be no longer resistant to corniness: His alias used to be intended to shoehorn “Gesamtkunstwerk” into “Einstein,” as in Alfred—overstuffed references stretched by way of juvenile overreach into the portentous portmanteau.)
GAMMA, then, comes as a cheerful wonder. As a substitute of seeking to be cool, Gesaffelstein has plunged headfirst into camp. Glowering, industrial-grade techno is in large part a factor of the previous. Instead, he offers us a winking amalgam of overdriven synth-pop and antique rock’n’roll. 1970s electro-punks Suicide and their French contemporaries Physician Combine & the Remix, in addition to synthabilly acolytes just like the Jesus and Mary Chain and Love and Rockets, are glaring influences on Gesaffelstein’s distorted circuits, throbbing arpeggios, and motorik grooves. Lévy’s analog-rooted sound design has all the time been one in all his robust issues, and his synths have by no means buzzed as vigorously as they do right here. Filters howl, lasers zap, and distortion builds like a tea kettle about to blow. The entire album’s a revolt of squelch and clang.
Depeche Mode—an act that is aware of a factor or two about turning top camp into stadium-filling pop track—forged a good longer shadow. That’s thank you partially to the Some Nice Praise-esque accents that clutter the document like such a lot of tarnished lug nuts, glassy FM tones suggesting the steely clank of chains. (Thought for an excellent secure phrase: “Yamaha DX7.”) But it surely’s due much more to singer Yan Wagner, GAMMA’s lone vocalist, whose oily baritone lubricates six of the document’s 11 tracks. In “Arduous Goals,” his leering, bluesy singsong feels like an armored-up homage to Dave Gahan at his leather-trousered hardest. In “The Highest,” which does for AI what “At the back of the Wheel” did for B&D, he in fact sings the word “at the back of the wheel.” A lot of the Depeche Mode worship is similarly Lévy’s doing: The instrumental “Tyranny” faucets into the similar 6/8 shuffle that “Non-public Jesus” borrowed from T. Rex.
