Vitalic, OK Cowboy
Featured Album
Ecstatic and excessive, Vitalic's electro-house is simply glorious.
A suitably overdriven and over-everything example of the dance genre known as electro-house, Vitalic's OK Cowboy finds floor-killing tracks in thickets of noise just waiting to be cut down and shaped into blocks. The short, mellow opener gives a valuable look into the French producer's method, evoking a shaggy-haired '70s prog-rocker freaking out in front of a vintage synthesizer the size of a church organ. From there, it's all strobed madness reminiscent of Daft Punk, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and gamey electroclash fattened up by growth hormone. "Poney Part 1" stomps through a beat made both heavy and weightless by swirls of phantasmagorical mist spit out with every bass kick. "My Friend Dario" adds vampy female vocals about a speeding auto that could be either an old Camaro or a futuristic concept car spinning on a glitzy convention-center stage.
As in all of Vitalic's harder tracks, the sizzle at play makes the ear recoil like an eye hit with a floodlight. It's ecstatic and excessive, to glorious effect. The pace slows through moodier tracks like "The Past," but the grain and gloss on the sound palette remain the same. Not that something so refined as a palette seems to have been used for banging anthems like "La Rock 01" and "No Fun"; they're more the product of paint cans shaken to a fizz and thrown into the outer reaches of space.
