Pitchfork

It turns out, by order of happenstance, that an ideal way to commune with the time-stamped sounds on Kings of Electro involves running on a treadmill with a small screen at eye-level showing a muted cable broadcast of Revenge of the Nerds II. The scenario couldn't be more 1980s, or less cerebral. Suffice it to say, the Revenge of the Nerds movies have not yet been seized upon by cineastes with discerning tastes. Then again, it's easy to imagine some deluxe-edition DVD coming out and making a compelling case for the cultural import of everything from the films' proto-Computer Age depiction of nerds to the period-faithful inscription on Booger's favorite T-shirt: "Who farted?"

So it goes too with Kings of Electro, a 2xCD compilation of sounds that have already been historically revived. It doesn't count as a revelation at this point to survey how crucial a role 1980s electro plays in contemporary music of all kinds, but it proves revelatory to measure the profound power of the curatorial process when meted out by the right minds. For his part, Playgroup leader Trevor Jackson counts as one of those people: He's figured highly in the resurrection of electro as a genre and a sound, both with his own production work and as the impresario behind his erstwhile label Output Recordings. For the Playgroup half of Kings of Electro (the other disc was compiled by the German duo Alter Ego), Jackson focuses on electro as it sounded in its time of origin. The mostly 80s tracks he showcases tend toward the minimal and the raw, with a shared streak of that special kind of goofy naiveté that plays out in movements too young to worry about propriety.

The sole objective of Whodini's "Magic's Wand" is to explain how a new thing called a "rap attack" differs from more familiar maladies of its day. (A counterpoint vocal from a choice call-and-response volley: "She said rap attack, man, not heart attack!") In another highlight, over ever-shifting mechanical bongos, Tilt seems to confuse the governing rules of video games with those of pinball. It's the kind of stuff that signals an era when an order to "give the DJ a break" still played as a precociously clever pun, when generous bass-lines bumped under delicious drum-sounds as natural and organic as a box of Gobstoppers.

The second disc moves up in time. Making sense of their own roots in house and techno, Alter Ego focus more on latter-day extrapolations that redress electro as an idea more than a sound in-and-of itself. Highly technical tracks by Plastikman and Robert Hood skew as studious and austere appreciations, while the monumental 2-step garage anthem "Doom's Night" (by Azzido Da Bass) churns over a walloping beat that couldn't have been imaginable to a vintage electro act with a name like Dynamix 2. The Alter Ego disc is less electro than "electro," with quotation marks that play more like serious tributes than signs of winking appropriation. It's an important distinction to draw in a current time when any and all history seems ripe for revisiting-- it's also a healthy measure of how resilient electro sounds on a compilation that works to bind the literal and the lasting.