A sensation not unlike slapping yourself in the face

I'd seen Modeselektor mentioned a few times on I Love Music but I never actually heard them until I plugged M.I.A. into Pandora and one of their songs came up as being similar (specifically, the song "Silikon" off of Hello Mom!, which could fairly be described as "M.I.A. for people who want more straightforward dancehall influence and hate M.I.A.'s voice"). I, of course, gooned out over them and immediately bought both of their albums, which are fantastic and lovely but not the point of this post.

I know nothing about Apparat, the other artist that makes up the group Moderat; listening to the collaborative's self-titled album makes me want to change that. I picked up Moderat on a whim; I had gotten out of the habit of buying things based on tenuous connections or word-of-mouth a few years ago and have been slowly working my way back into it over the past six months with great success (expect a rambling post about M83, aka my "How Did I Never Hear About These Guys Before Now" band of 2008, sometime soon). If I keep finding things as awesome as Moderat, I'll be a very happy person. Check this out:



This is pretty representative of the album as a whole; decent tempo dance tunes done on mellow synth patches with the occasional vocal. The juxtaposition of driving energy in the beat mixed in with the mellow warmth of the synths is what really attracts me to this music; every song make me want to bang my head in the tenderest manner possible. All I have to do is close my eyes while I'm listening to this and I'm instantly transported to a gigantic dancefloor filled with true PLUR practitioners, everyone bouncing and gyrating together in a mad frenzy of love and euphoria. Pretty much every song shares a lot of the hallmarks I love in my favorite choral pieces; long, held swells mixed in with droning, incremental chord changes matched over more active repeated figures, all building towards a painfully glorious crescendo that releases all of the pent-up joy and pain in your body in one ecstatic rush.

Buy this. Now.