Is This Now?

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Eight untitled tracks; 12"-style card sleeve stickered with a still from a political execution. Disturbing, but the mood within is far from oppressive. A good 67 minutes of music - nothing radically different for Kirk - funky and obliquely Africanized head-charge techno, superior to the last Alphaphone entry, the disappointing Dark Magus - "Night Watchmen". Unlike that uneven attempt at connecting with some ill-defined electrofunk/ breakbeat/hiphop vibe, this is a solid set defined by a Nitrogen/late-Cabaret Voltaire mastery of gritty grooviness. Kirk is judicious with his loops and does well in avoiding the stuck-groove rut often threatened by his sequencing. It's nice to hear his music revisiting the sparsity and spookiness of "Red Mecca" without toppling into the dreary Industrial coarseness of the Nitrogen tracks. The 5th track works especially well, heady coconut-hull and frangipani tropicalia evoked in the alluringly affected (and no less seductive for it) style of the Pork Records posse. certainly a kinder, gentler Kirk (the demeanor becomes him) - even when the music is tinged with a whiff of menace (the very moody tracks 6,7 - atmosphere enough for a dozen cut-and-run narc vs. trafficker vs. bad island voodoo flicks here!) or a jolt of that familiar CV disco-demon energy (track 8, which resolves in the sort of ingenious and gorgeously contrapuntal coda one expects from Steve Pickton). Trafficante's debut is a true 'keeper' - a thoroughly enjoyable album destined for many an encore appearance in the cd-changer. When was the last time that this could be said about a recent Richard H. Kirk album. . .