Motor - Unhuman

The acid sound gets an electro-house re-birth on Unhuman, fitted around jackin' beats, vocodered lyrics, and erratic clicks.

Album Review by Alex Burden | 11 Apr 2007
Album title: Unhuman
Artist: Motor
Label: Novamute
Motor are back with a noticeably developed follow-up to Klunk, taking the klunking industrial machinery electronica into warmer and more complex territory. The acid sound gets an electro-house re-birth on Unhuman, fitted around jackin' beats, vocodered lyrics, and erratic clicks. Speeded up samples from Josh Wink's infamous acid-house track, Higher State of Consciousness, are blended with Vitalic-styled melodies on title track Unhuman, pitch-bent into droning chords and one crunchy-as-dry-cornflakes beat. Flashback and AC 775 are also imbued with raging acid repetitions, Tetris beeps, a body-jacking beat, and subtle echoed and clipped synths - the early 90s updated for the late 00s. The melody is left to do most of the talking on Re-Format, and luckily, it's a killer, and bleep#1 unleashes the angry electronica, inspiring images of manic Moroder key jabbing in a momentum building moment. The lines are blurred between techno, jackin' acid house and electronica through Motor's sophisticated syncopation and the constant adding of layers to this multifarious electronic onion. Drug Punk subtly builds shuffles and fizz into a stripped down, fast-paced glitch drum breakdown with the vocodered vocal from A.I. hell declaring a need for drugs, and Night Drive's tussle of synth and percussion faintly establishes itself as a meaner Fischerspooner, shedding the disco chic. And just when you think they've covered most bases, they roll out the brooding European electro and Mode Selektor tweakings on Tete En Plastique and 20 Volts of Steel. Attention has been paid to the advantages of white noise and experimenting with wave length, and Sikk captures the boom of a great jet decreasing in speed through wiring and reverb alone. It's a good sign when a band only improves. [Alex Burden]
Released: Out now. Also check out their debut Klunk, out now on Novamute.