The narrative of the chiptune scene often seems built around
key releases that push the limits or define trends within chip. The ‘Informations
Chase’s, ‘Decades’s, ‘MoeNES’s, these hallmark releases have come to signal what
is possible with chiptune. And now, ‘GET HYPER’ joins those ranks this coming
Monday via Cheapbeats.
Firstly; the programming is masterful. Written on a single
DMG, the sounds are tome-thick, with kicks hitting like hammers and
ground-shaking bass. Secondly; this is simply the best EDM/Trap chiptune I have
ever heard. ‘DAWGZ’ does trap better than the club DJs. Fuck the Boiler Room,
MONODEER has this on lock, and with enough attitude to out-chill every hipkid
for miles. Elsewhere, ‘4XAA’ comes straight from the dancefloors, before
sliding into KODEK-esque funkery, and ‘CHK-DIZ-OUT’ brings house to the party,
crossing 80s and modern tech house with that MONODEER ‘wub-of-death’.
As with earlier MONODEER, the drops here are 50-feet tall. Following
powerful stomps, the drops of ‘MNMLSTNCH’ are so destructively huge it’s
cathartic. Opener ‘WOOP’ builds tension expertly, slowly meandering before
plummeting into violently swaggering groove, whilst ‘TRP.AM’ mixes huge build
ups and unassuming drops the size of bison alongside amen breaks. The title
track is phenomenal too, bringing the constantly shifting, groove-rife
percussion of track ‘JUKEBOXXX’ and monumental drops and attitude of ‘GRM.EY’
with more immediate pacing and some sweat-inducing stylistic shifts.
The album is rounded off by ‘LEVELS’, sounding remarkably MONODEER
circa 2011, not that the previous tracks don't, but here the old cavalcades of
slow beats and swagger alongside what are as of now the most robust melodies to
arrive from MONODEER’s Gameboy definitely reinstate the ‘Noise.bmp’ model. Are
there any negatives to this album? Well, despite how fantastic the
aforementioned ‘LEVELS’ is, along with the equally great ‘JUKEBOXXX’, they feel
slightly out of place, but that doesn’t mask how good the tracks are
individually.
I’d love to sit here and say “I saw the potential for this
from the start” after we released MONODEER’s debut back in 2011, but that would
be bullshit. This is beyond potential, bigger than ego, this is quite simply
fucking ground-breaking. A few months ago I spoke about the need for a new ‘Information
Chase’, a new hallmark release to define the changes in the chip scene, and it
appears to have arrived in the form of ‘GET HYPER’, and with many demanding this to
be the year of NES, it may be so through proxy; I’m fairly sure MONODEER just
‘won’ LSDJ.
Special thanks to Stephan Tul for proofing
