Pitchfork

Bob Sinclar's 2006 hit "Rock This Party"-- an amusing rendezvous between dancehall's Kopa riddim and samples of C+C Music Factory's "Gonna Make You Sweat", and by far last year's most perverse French house track-- revealed just how meaningless the separations between French house's underground and overground are. You won't hear anything like the Sinclair track on Ed Rec 2, Ed Banger's second label compilation, although it's not for lack of trying. The stumbling block is in their heads, perhaps: Whereas Ed Banger are stymied by the erroneous assumption that interesting ideas can only be realized at the expense of unambiguously seizing the pop jugular, Sinclar just went out and did both.

Ed Rec 2 reveals clearly enough the flaws in the label's aesthetic vision: resident rapper Uffie, already a dubious proposition, sounds positively execrable on her ode to haters, "Dismissed", but if this is by far the worst inclusion here, it's not (just) because Uffie can't rap. Blame the creative bankruptcy of the label's intermittent fascination with sneeringly amateurish, stuttery send-ups of old skool electro, which also ruins the Yoko Ono electro of DJ Mehdi's "Lucky Girl". These artists should, one and all, give up on trying to tell jokes. Luckily, most of Ed Rec 2 witnesses the label roster in consolidation mode, staging a strategic retreat to the messy, rock-influenced take on French house which Daft Punk codified on Human After All. While the move invites accusations of redundancy, I'm inclined to look upon Ed Banger's reduced expectations with some sympathy. One needs to accept from the outset that Ed Banger are unlikely to produce something as all-conquering as "Rock & Roll" or as marvelously confounding as "Aerodynamic" in order to fully enjoy the enthusiasm with which they go about colonizing the space between these two poles, from the ridiculous Genesis synth runs of Mr. Flash's "Disco Dynamite" to the rusted-on percussion presets of Feadz's lurching "Edwrecker".

And perhaps some of the elder statesmen's production nous has rubbed off as well. Justice's "Phantom" fuses hyper-plasticity with noise for noisiness' sake in characteristic fashion. While it's hardly surprising, it's perhaps the duo's best executed effort to date, the descent from disco sparkle into a mid-range black hole and back out again carried off with agility, even grace. Busy P's "Rainbow Man" may simply reiterate the same grinding, slow, mechanical house blueprint that Daft Punk established with "Steam Machine" and that SebastiAn has since made his own, but why should we expect more than good craftmanship? Why can't there be an entire genre of these menacingly sexy dominatrix backing tracks? By comparison, SebastiAn's own "Greel" is disappointingly lacking in character, its mechanic gewalt expressing brute force but nothing to give that power meaning.

Indeed, it's usually when Ed Banger's artists get dark-- rather than merely loud-- that they are most compelling. Far and away the best track on this compilation, Krazy Baldhead's "Strings of Death" performs the unlikely feat of summarizing the label's entire aesthetic while sounding like nothing else in its back catalogue, boasting the type of muscular rock groove that the label should have been cornering all along. Instead of settling for a straightahead churn or stomp, it slinks its way around overblown, bluesy guitar riffs while paranoid synths and snapping electro beats add a slight industrial inflection, somewhere between Ministry at their most lithe and Depeche Mode at their most heavy. It's actually thrilling, and I'd wager part of the thrill derives from the unexpectedness of the equation, as if industrial glam-rock is the unintended and explosive result of a naïve French House alchemy experiment. If Ed Banger can only stumble upon greatness by accident, let's hope the artists never work out exactly what it is they're doing on tracks like these.