Charles Desrochers / Asst. Lifestyles Editor
After countless remixes and a week debut album, MSTRKRFT seems ready to break into the ranks of pop mainstream.
Fist of God is a departure from their 2006 release, The Looks. Where Looks might have been cleaned and polished ready for a night on the town, Fist of God is stumbling out of the bar after last call, looking to score some blow.
It follows a trend of other house groups in its production and lends its songs to other artists voices in what seems to be an attempt at cracking the charts.
It’s gritty, it’s catchy and it makes me miss when member Jesse F. Keeler played bass for Death From Above 1979. But it seems like the DFA 1979 days are long gone, so to anyone who is waiting for an electro version, my advise to you is t not waste your energy, because MSTRKRFT will never be that.
Fist does offer more grit than their previous remixes but some of it seems forced and misplaced. The distortion and dirt that I had been looking forward to was nauseating by the seventh song.
“Vuvuvu” offers no substance other than a way to make the track before it seem longer. It doesn’t accentuate or echo what makes “Bounce” good.
It builds on repetition without any major pay-off using a minute-long intro to draw out our patience and attempting to be one of those songs that is constantly building up, yet with it’s constant tempo and lack of layering turns out to be a 4-minute waste of time. It seems that MSTRKRFT’s method was to make thirty seconds of music and then bullshit the remaining three minutes. In this regard it makes Fist seem exactly like The Looks.
I’d like to believe that this was the way they made this album because it’s offensive to think someone spent more than three weeks making a record like this.
After listening to it in it’s entirety, you will find yourself not knowing what just happened. It’s just that each song is so much like the last with minor peaks throughout that you will forget about almost immediately.
This album gets old very quickly. Even the second song “1,000 Cigarettes” ends up being played out by the end since it comes back to haunt us as the last track, only this time it features Freeway.
If the latter is good enough to be on the album then the instrumental should either be a B-side or left off because the only purpose it serves is padding. For whatever reason MSTRKRFT is in their element when there are using other peoples material. Their remix of Metric’s “Monster Hospital” is much more enjoyable then almost any of their songs on the Fist of God.
Is it bad that this group can’t create decent original works? I don’t think it is, I truly do enjoy their remixes. It’s not like the group makes much money off these records either.
It merely gives them an excuse to continue touring with stops at Ministry of Sound and Coachella, where the majority of their set will most likely be remixes.
