Pitchfork

This is getting a bit ridiculous, isn't it, all these 8s? The Pitchfork brass is currently engaged in a bit of half-serious handwringing behind the scenes: we seem to love every other record these days, just keep that in mind. But they know there's nothing we can do; we're only as cynical as the music we're given, and two months worth of gems probably means karmic retribution in the form of a pitiful summer or a Unicorns reunion or a Robert Pollard anthology or something. In the meantime, there's nothing wrong with a bit of prolonged enthusiasm, even if it has the unfortunate side-effect of effing with the wheat to chaff ratio. I was thinking the other day that between Run the Road, M.I.A., LCD Soundsystem, Mu, Fischerspooner, Antony and the Johnsons, Bloc Party, Out Hud, and a handful of other records I am forgetting or have yet to discover, you could make a very good case for the first quarter of 2005 being as strong as the entirety of 2004 for full-lengths. (Singles is another, much sadder story altogether.)

Anyway, I'll confess, I'm a Kompakt head, but since I've never really cared much for Justus Köhncke's poppier, vocal-based stuff, I wasn't expecting to like this much at all. But then again, given that there's barely been a disappointing record released this year (Daft Punk get off on a technicality 'cause Human After All hasn't actually been released yet), I shouldn't be surprised that I do. So, yeah, this is good, too: Life is but a stage and we are all but French figure skating judges or Leonard Maltins, or something.

So in record-review parlance, this is what you'd call a "grower," which admittedly is another way of saying that if I hadn't been too lazy to get up and change the disc at a certain point, I'd probably still be in favor of keeping Köhncke on a strict diet of house numbers. His second full-length for Kompakt and his third overall, Doppelleben (German for "double life," see) runs the gamut between dancefloor crowd-pleasers like "Timecode" (which is included here, albeit egregiously, in a single edit that runs at half the length of the original) and drippy, lovelorn pop like "Wo Bist Du?"

Köhncke has lots of fun in the space between those two poles. You can tell that he went into Doppelleben without any real mandate because each track just sort of floats from one convention to the next, but rather than sounding like a disparate batch of songs, the end result is like a love note to his favorite music from the past 20 years. Even as it bounces from the clanging industrial of "Loreley" to the faithful rendition of Carly Simon's "Coming Around Again" ("Alles Nochmal"), it's held together by Köhncke's lush, full-bodied production style, which is as distinctive and as well-articulated as that of any Kompakt artist.

Fittingly, the best two tracks here prove Köhncke to be as adept at the vocal-pop stuff as he is at the Kompakt nerd stuff. With its tick-tock opening and slow-timed releases, the eight-minute long "Elan" (a condensed version of which also opens the album) is his obvious attempt to follow up "Timecode", and although it doesn't have the same spastic little builds, it's almost as good. Elsewhere, the campy vocoded lead and piercing string stabs of the future-disco confection "Schwabylon" sound like Köhncke trying to approximate Daft Punk, which is doubly useful now that Daft Punk no longer wish to approximate Daft Punk. But dammit, I'm buzz harshing a little bit there, aren't I? Human After All isn't released for a couple of weeks-- let's enjoy this incredible little run while we can.

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