★★★★☆
If you were a fan of Modselektion Volume One, you’ll love Modeselektion Volume Two. Review over. Care to elaborate you say? Well this one has got more twists and turns, though no dead ends, than a madman-designed maze. Qualms about remaining unmixed don’t apply, as it’s best to soak up each ear-rattling cut individually given the topsy-turvy tracklist that has banished the word subtlety from its vocabulary and is found permanently hovering over the destruct button.
Fronting the charge are strong-silent assassins Phon.O and Egyptrixx, smouldering with a punishing smoothness, amidst the dawn raids peddling 50 shades of bass and with the whiff of napalm in their nostrils. Modeselektor’s duty is to match the calculated with the less exact, comparing Monolake’s position on the edge of chaos to Clark’s arcade frenzy hurtling over said ledge and Mouse on Mars showing equally kamikaze footwork/juke tendencies. The battlegrounds are tailor made for Lazer Sword and even tumbledown beatsmiths from further leftfield such as Prefuse73, who serves up something of a red herring (or Herren). That is until Jan Driver audaciously reinvents a William Orbit/Tiësto classic.
The firing range also considers bare-bone booms (Dark Sky, offering a degree of salvation in the form of a 4×4 rhythm), to busyness approaching breaking point (Diamond Version, sounding like they’ve electro-pimped an AT-ST Walker). This is a compilation cage rage that’ll smash down defenses.
File under: Addison Groove, Anstam, Siriusmo