Dance music certainly needed a kick up the arse but this is altogether more than anyone was expecting. "OK Cowboy" is the most immense, twisted electro/metal/techno soundclash imaginable. Like a ferocious fistfight in which a drunken Metallica, livid Joey Beltram and psychotically PCP-loaded Daft Punk all give Goldfrapp a richly deserved good kicking. It's fantastic.
Bafflingly, this beast of an album comes wrapped in all the packaged over-familiarity that has prompted so many to despair of the ailing scene. Bland name vaguely evoking a drug-induced state: check. Cover art reminiscent of 80s 'graphic novels': check. Released on a French record label: uh-oh. But try to get over this unforgivable failure to market such fierce music and imagine that the album is really named after the track whose title best seems to sum up it's aesthetic: "Repair Machine". Because that's what appears to be going on here.
Pascal Arbez, 32, takes all the tools that are familiar from the post-Acid House landscape and repurposes them to craft a close approximation of crazed futuristic rock from a bunch of old electro keyboards. What he comes up with is music that finds its zenith when at its heaviest, pregnant with barely suppressed rage. Witness the numb-skulled electro stomp of "No Fun" (not a Stooges cover but worthy of association with Iggy's dumb rock classic). Or the droning primordial techno of celebrated 12-inch release, "Poney Part 1", which recalls one of Laurent Garnier's finest aggro moments, "The Sound of the Big Babou".
Conversely, the album is at its least appealing when coming on like relatively straight Daft Punk filter schtick. Though there are mercifully few examples of the latter, "U & I" seems like a moment of uncertainty in an otherwise relentlessly determined record. For the most part tracks such as "My Friend Dario" and "Newman" are the sound of nails being furiously hammered into the coffin the Punks recently built for themselves on third album, "Human After All".
Beyond the grooves etched in this record, what is most exciting is the ease with which Arbez brushes aside the canon of 90s giants. Those sonic dictators that have held dance in their vicelike grip for so long. "OK Cowboy" seems to draw as much from the energy and aggression of guitars as it does from its most obvious antecedents: techno, electro and house. Granted, it's unlikely to age gracefully, but when was that ever the point with this kind of thing? It exists and draws all its power from the here and now.
"OK Cowboy" may just be the first useful manifesto for dance music in 2005. The message is: there is no manifesto. Now, consider that arse squarely booted.
by James Poletti