MSTRKRFT - Fist of God Album Review

Review of MSTRKRFT album Fist of God.

MSTRKRFT, stands for Masterkraft, just incase you're an idiot or something, caught a lot of attention back in 2006 remixing the likes of The Metric, Bloc Party, The Kills and even Kylie Minogue. Their debut 'The Looks' caught the wave of the dirty indie-electro scene that's been emerging from car adverts for the latter part of this decade. They made it big, fast. Though having said that the duo were both involved in music before. Jesse F. Keeler, formerly of rigid indie-rockers Death From Above and Alex Puodziukas, likes to be known as Al-P, formerly of digi-poppers Girlsareshort. Here we have 'Fist of God', the eponymous follow up. Lets see how it fairs.

Opener 'It Ain't Love' starts things up. A promising inherently chopped French-house sound littered with vocal by R n' B something or other Little Mo. Its punchy, heavy and not much like 'The Looks'. Its good, but it sounds just like most of the stuff to come out of Ed Banger recently. Justice, SebastiAn, take your pick. The Daft Punk influenced masses have come out to play in their drones over the last 5 years or so. The Dafty influence becomes more and more evident as this album continues. '1,000 Cigarettes' could easily be from the lost tapes of 'Discovery' Daft Punk's second release. More R n' B standards provided by N.O.R.E and Isis on the next track. Same checklist as the first track. Not an awful lot between 'em to be frank. John Legend brings the mediocre R n' B guestlist to a head on 'Heartbreaker', and this isn't the last of the poor vocal collaborations either.skip track.and again. You get just past halfway when you start to realise that the MSTRKRFT boys only own one synthesiser. Nothing to be ashamed of , but if its you're main draw you should maybe work abit harder on pushing the sound into new places. Crunk MC E-40 gets involved on 'Click Click'. Now I've been hoping for some good crunk or hyphy to surface for awhile, and it has in dribs and drabs. However, when I saw E-40 on the track listing I was quite excited to hear what they had come up with. Well, what we have here is the same. Who the vocalist on any of these tracks is irrelevant frankly. They all sound like derivatives of the same song with a different vocal.'Word Up' featuring Ghostface Killer is a more balls-out twisted house affair. They've worked on the synth sound, creating a whirling acid vibe that filters in and out building, and building, and building, and building. Then it ends. No real pay off. Not only that but Ghostface's contribution has been reduced to cut up curse words repetitively dropped here, there and anywhere. A real shame.

Well.the album ended. I'm sat here thinking; 'How do I summarise?'.All I can really say is that individually, any of these tracks could be dropped and make a party, but is there really any need for a whole album of them?? Think on that.

- Thom Holmes