Pitchfork

Kalabrese might be minimal house music's first great defector since Matthew Herbert; he's certainly its most inventive upsetter since Isolée went all disco-schizo with We Are Monster. Now forget I mentioned both those names, much less "minimal house music," because Rumpelzirkus, Kalabrese's beguiling debut album, absolutely deserves to be heard on its own terms.

The record opens with a platitude wrapped in a cliché, as a Jamaican-accented voice-- certainly not Kalabrese's-- deadpans, "Where's the future? It's not the past, it's not the present. It's…the future." You can take your finger off the eject button, though. This isn't some European roots-reggae travesty; that's just Kalabrese's off-kilter sense of humor. Living up to the latter half of its name, Rumpelzirkus carries about it an air of the carnivalesque, or at least the tongue-in-cheek, that verges on the outright bizarre. (What else are we to make of a song like "Aufm Klo", that begins with Kalabrese, sounding a bit like Bob Dylan as filtered through a vocoder, singing, "I got pain in my ass…"?)

Beyond that tongue-in-cheek intro, there's actually next to no reggae here, beyond the obvious genetic trace of dub that enlivens all electronic music. There's just as little overt futurism, if by futurism you mean the streamlined forms and steely timbres that have electrified the electronic-music imaginary since Kraftwerk and Cybotron. Rumpelzirkus is a bit of a head-scratcher: Is it a click-house album aimed at listeners who prefer real live instruments or a lush comedown reverie for real live clubkids? Really, it's both of those things and more.

Most of the album's cuts ride a bumptious 4/4 beat, which won't be surprising given the album's distribution via Kompakt and Kalabrese's own discography. (Perlon published his best known single, and various of his tracks have appeared on James Holden's At the Controls session, the Four:Twenty label's Circoloco at DC10 Ibiza showcase, and Akufen and Tyrant's respective Fabric mix CDs.) But this is hardly your bog-standard oonce-oonce. Most of Kalabrese's beats are made not with drum machines or soft synths but clattery samples swathed in natural reverb: sticks on rims, pots and pans, creaky bedsprings, drunken handclaps. He's not afraid of a fat analog kick or fizzy, filtered white-noise hi-hats, but the machine aesthetic never dominates-- especially once we move out of the percussive layers. With the exception of a few growling analog synthesizers, electric and acoustic instruments dominate-- low-slung electric bass, kalimbas, glockenspiels, tambourines, horns, and acoustic guitar-- giving rise to the specter of folk-house, or maybe, just maybe, something we might call struminal.

But ultimately it's not what Kalabrese puts in his music that's important, but his sophisticated compositional sensibility. At their best, Kalabrese's songs draw simultaneously from dance music and pop songwriting, fusing a rare sort of architectonic strength with a tender, unabashedly sentimental sense of narrative.

In keeping with all good dance music, there is no real division between the rhythmic and melodic registers. On "Deep", for instance, a lone acoustic guitar figure taps out a gleaming ostinato pattern that the beat warily circles like a side-stepping spider. On "Heartbreak Hotel", hand drums, spindly guitar lines, Moogy squeals, and groaning vocal harmonies string together a kind of pointillistic approximation of a country ballad. "Not the Same Shoes" starts off almost like a parody of a minimal house track, complete with a baritone voice supplying an eighth-note boom-boom-boom pattern, before blooming into a gravelly duet with the Swiss laptop chanteuse Kate Wax. He-said/she-said verses make a play for radio-readiness as vines of bright analog synthesizer go climbing like morning glory through the track's percussive lattice. (It's a remarkably similar strategy to that used by LCD Soundsystem's "Someone Great".)

On the very best songs, Kalabrese extends his ambitions beyond the horizontal, proving himself to be a remarkably talented songwriter, full stop. "Hide", featuring the rosin-throated Guillermo Sohrya, goes so far as to suggest José González' acoustic mood pieces as fleshed out with Afrobeat-inflected guitar licks, swirling Hammond organs, jittery synthesizer blips and a woozy barroom guitar solo. Cozy as a duvet, its most immediate reference point might be Yo La Tengo's "Autumn Sweater"-- but better written, better produced, and better suited for tugging heartstrings to the point of unraveling. It's a shame that Valentine's Day is behind us, because "Hide" is the lovers' mixtape closer of the year.

Rumpelzirkus' greatest asset might just be its sense of surprise, rolling as magically haphazard as a jam band in top form. Just listen to the way "Oisi Zuekunft", the album's oddball opener, evolves unexpectedly from a grab-bag of po-faced phrases and sly musical jokes into a slow-burning groove: the last third of the song squeezes the horns into a bellows that stokes the funk and blows away any stray trace of irony. (Just as almost every individual track displays a remarkable sense of development, the whole album is marked by a masterful sense of flow: given that the 11 cuts were initially released on three 12-inch E.P.s, Rumpelzirkus makes for an uncannily cohesive longplayer.) The same trick inflates the closing "Body Tight" from its anemic percussive opening into a billowing sentimental singalong. Rumpelzirkus's title, it turns out, has less to do with circuses than with the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin (or in German, Rumpelstilzchen): Kalabrese takes straw and spins it into gold.