Sit down and listen to lots and lots of ghettotech. Then put on Assault and the reason why he’s light years ahead will be readily apparent. There’s the effortless complexity, the seamless, brilliant transitions, the sheer musical virtuosity — and that’s not even getting into Assault’s personae, the tough player routine that shields the nerdy knob twister interior. Like Assault’s other Detroit mixpolations, this album compresses several albums’ worth of material onto a single disc, except this one ups the ante, jamming eight six-tracks into an hour, for an average of 30 seconds a song. Off the Chain also ratchets up the pace, with bpms charting in gabba territory. Stylistically, the album picks up where the more insane parts of Belle Island Tech left off and runs screaming into the distance, inventing new regions of noise and rhythm. The album’s breakthrough track, however, is “Sometimes,” which sets Assault apart aesthetically with its honest and, in its way, beautiful treatment of sexual relations that accepts both sexual vulnerability and aggressivity. The running joke of the rest of the album is that people keep calling him, interrupting his work on the album, so Assault just puts it into the mix. It’s a perfect example of what makes ghetto tec formally interesting — the ability to absorb any influence and subsume it into the mix, much like Public Enemy’s collage style enabled them to incorporate and deflate criticism in a single move. It’s truly unlike anything else and it’s not even his best album. – Brian Whitener