Savvy Brooklyn Clubbers Create Mash-Genuity

It’s no mere coincidence that the twenty-first-century indie rock’s pale crop of complainers-Conor Oberst, Sufjan Stevens, the Shins, Modest Mouse, and on and on-has sprouted up alongside the iPod and the two-inch-tall computer speaker set.  The age of cheap, easily distributed, endlessly reproducible digital music is also the age of lightweight audio hardware.  If your sound is skinny enough to slip through an earbud, then you’ve got a lot less to lose.

So pH10-the Brooklyn duo of Recone F. Helmut and SyBO-have achieved something surprising and admirable with Well Connected.  There are bass lines here so deep, so heavy, and so grinding that outside of their natural setting in the dance club-where they would bounce the olives in martini glasses five blocks away and threaten sensitive bowels with involuntary convulsions-you’d expect them to sound, and even forgive them for sounding, a little misguided.  They don’t, though.  Why not?

For starters: the album is fresh, by the standards of electronic music.  This is not just a reheated hash of audio samples.  (There is an “Intro” that scratches into a recording of a mellow male voice endorsing “what they call electronica music.”  Astoundingly, this is Barry Manilow on Larry King Live.)  The overall sound is a peculiar transatlantic meld of English club music and American underground hip hop, bridged improbably by death metal.  The combination, unmistakably dance music but weirder than hell, is both simple and unusual: rap with a gapless bass track, a kind of anti-G-funk.

While Helmut and SyBO handle the backbeats, the rapping is done by a series of visitors.  As the title of Well Connected suggests, pH10 boasts some talented pals.  The scene-stealer is Pete Miser, who spits the album’s manifesto on “Enter the Underground” and later gets lippy on “BK United”: Hard to believe / an unsigned MC / got a nasty-ass flow like me / but it’s the truth!  (The only sizeable disappointment is I-45, who in “Bulldozin” gets caught shoplifting a rhyme-”California / warn ya“-from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.)

All the pushing and shoving at the mic, because it saves the album from the monotony that spoils most recorded techno, frames and complements pH10’s unaccompanied tracks.  These, as though they were teaser trailers for the live show, are kept under three minutes, until the last and best of them: “Yiggplant,” recorded live at the Frying Pan in New York.  So it sounds better in the club after all.  So what?

Bill Porter