/WUVT-FM 90.7/ - Ford & Lopatin Channel Pressure Review

Games, one of last year’s most promising bands on the electro-weirdness Hippos In Tanks label, is releasing their first full length album on June 7, 2011, but they’re not doing it on their old label or even under their old band name. The production team of Joel Ford and Daniel Lopatin has decided to release under the name Ford and Lopatin due to the possibility of legal disputes with rapper The Game. They’ve also created their own record label Software as a subsidiary of premier indie/shoegaze label Mexican Summer (Best Coast, Puro Instinct).

Channel Pressure is the name of the album and, if its neon cover art and expectedly anal analog electronic music weren’t a nerd-out enough, it’s also a concept album. The story is about a boy named Joey Rogers in a space-age future world. Though the lines you need to connect the dots of Channel Pressure’s storyline are often miles long (not to mention the fact that the robotically filtered vocals are hard to understand), it's a rare error in a world of overly explicit concept albums and actually might wind up making the album more interesting. If we weren’t listening to an abstract sci-fi storyline we’d be listening to generic female dance vocals like in Games’ ‘Strawberry Skies’, so it’s best to enjoy this added value for what it is: an ambitious approach from a band who, being both new on the music scene and a retro dance outfit, had no obligation whatsoever to do anything ambitious.

Though the band itself is still wet behind the ears, Ford and Lopatin are far from it. Joel Ford is the vocalist of 1970s-esque rock band Tigercity and Daniel Lopatin has released analog synthesizer music with much critical acclaim under the name Oneohtrix Point Never. The two’s styles are both extremely similar and extremely different. Both have a conviction for disco-era music that could only be described as lusty. Stylistically, however, Tigercity favors the organic and orderly, while Oneohtrix Point Never’s Music is robotic, unpredictable, and based on dissecting 1980s music, not deriving it. In essence, Ford and Lopatin is a project that would either meld beautifully or mix like water and oil. It turns out that it does the former: their styles are broken up into infinitesimal particles and combined into something that is 50% Tigercity and 50% Oneohtrix One, but is rarely discernable as either. Ford provides the vocals, but Lopatin runs them through effects that make Ford sound like another piece of musical equipment you’d plug into the wall. Lopatin’s obsessively intricate synthesizer sound is there, but only in timbre: it is the straightforward, golden pop melodies Ford specializes in that are the extremely solid foundation of Ford and Lopatin’s music.

Channel Pressure’s biggest crime is just being too damn short. It’s only forty minutes long, short for any album but especially an electronic one. When the climatic ‘Joey Rogers’ hits in its blazing 1980s pop glory, you’ve only been listening to the album for twenty minutes. It’s tough to sympathize with a storyline that’s blurry to begin with and unfolds way too quickly. At the same time, however, Ford and Lopatin’s tracks being always around three minutes infinitely increases their charm. You never get the feeling that Ford and Lopatin don’t have enough ideas to fill a six or seven minute song, just that they like to cram all of their ideas into a frantic three minutes. When all’s said and done, you honestly just wish there were more tracks on this album.

Compared with the work of Games only a mere six months before this release, Ford and Lopatin’s style is much denser and frankly more distinct and interesting. Part of this could be Prefuse 73’s mixing duties on this album. Another part could be Ford and Lopatin’s readiness to express their formerly latent love of fusion jazz. It doesn’t cohere as well with 1980s synth pop as Ford and Lopatin’s styles do with each other, but this synthesis is a seldom attempted, even theorized one and often turns up with interesting if too brief results. The jazzy instrumental tracks seem completely unhinged from the storyline of Channel Pressure, but Ford and Lopatin try to salvage that, blatantly but maybe successfully, with track titles like ‘Rock Center Paranoia’ and ‘G’s Dream’.

Overarching concepts and stylistic synthesis aside, Channel Pressure is just a really groovy album. ‘Emergency Room’, being released May 26^th on x-ray picture disc vinyl, is the first single but there are several tracks on here that are its equal or better. The second track ‘Channel Pressure’, while designed to set the stage for ‘Emergency Room’ and the album in general, is actually catchy enough to stand on its own. ‘Too Much MIDI (Please Forgive Me)’ is another standout track, especially glorious because it starts out in indigestible experimentation then blossoms into the most cruisingly cool dance groove since ‘In The Morning’ by Junior Boys. ‘The Voices’ is funny and not bad for dancing either, though it ends up being somewhat dwarfed by in my opinion this album’s strongest track, ‘Joey Rogers’. ‘Joey Rogers’ has universal pop appeal packaged in a squirming mass of electronic expertise, probably a once or twice in a lifetime experience.

Other genres are touched on in this album, for instance the Top 40 R&B of ‘Break Inside’, but Channel Pressure is at its core what Games started out making: synth pop. It’s delightfully easy to forget this at times, to think you’re floating in the mind of Miles Davis circa Bitches Brew reincarnated as a synthesizer enthusiast, but Ford and Lopatin always manage to reel you back into the dancefloor. Though this album comes up short of its lofty ambitions, perhaps frustratingly so since all Ford and Lopatin really had to do was add a couple well-placed tracks, it’s a very unique and memorable experience, two attributes electronic music has rarely taken on. All that Intelligent Dance Music you’ve been listening to since 1997? It’s just Intelligent Music. Let’s get the party started, sci-fi style.