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Sixteen Chapel

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  • CIAO Recs

Now a solo act following a split between Francesco "Phra" Barbaglia and his former bandmate Andrea "Bot" Fratangelo, Crookers gets back to the basics of his sound. His new album, Sixteen Chapel, suggests that lowered expectations can actually be liberating.

Remember Kid Cudi's "Day 'n' Nite"? Sure you do. And the version that comes to mind is probably Crookers' mix, for good reason. Combining that irresistible hook, and Cudi's lackadaisical flow, with the Italian duo's cleverly kinetic beats, the 2008 remix hinted at an exciting new world of internationally minded rap-dance crossover. Unfortunately, as a glance at the "#trap" tag on SoundCloud could tell you, said crossover hasn't worked out as well as hoped, and Crookers' 2010 album Tons of Friends is one indicator of where the train began to go off the rails. Stuffed with guest vocalists (Kelis, Pitbull,, Spank Rock, Roísín Murphy, Rye Rye, Yelle, Miike Snow, Drop the Lime, Steed Lord, et al) and bereft of any coherent through line, the album reeked of something dreamed up in a record label's boardroom.

Crookers' follow-up, the 2011 album Dr Gonzo, kept a tighter guestlist (Hudson Mohawke, Savage Skulls, Style of Eye, Surkin, Bobmo) and retreated to the duo's wheelhouse: boisterous, big-room club jams laced with woozy LFOs and vuvuzela. It also got them (briefly) signed to Diplo's Mad Decent. But it failed to make much of a mark, and at this point, Crookers—now a solo act, following a 2012 split between Francesco "Phra" Barbaglia and his former bandmate, Andrea "Bot" Fratangelo—is one of those perennially touring workhorses seemingly forever relegated to mid-sized font on festival lineups. His new album, Sixteen Chapel, suggests that lowered expectations can actually be liberating.

The album gets off to a good start with a pair of tracks that play to his strengths. "Picture This" brandishes a manic dial-tone melody and drums as crunchy as a wood-chipper; "Ability to Maximize" assembles a hyperkinetic array of tuned kicks and video-game bleeps around a whimsical flute melody. Both flash back to Roman Flügel's "Geht's Noch?", that brief moment when underground techno flirted with levity, and muscular beats and hypnotic grooves weren't necessarily incompatible with a sense of fun.

He returns to this mode throughout the album, with varying degrees of success. At their best—like "Sgeddo", which filters the Bomb Squad and Raymond Scott through fidgety house, or the squelchy "128BPM", a tribute to his favorite tempo—his productions boast inventive and astonishingly detailed sound design, with all manner of sonic non sequiturs fitting together into nonsensical patterns that nevertheless make a kind of intuitive, sensory sense. But he doesn't always know where to take those impulses. "WTP" samples a New York ballroom staple without bringing anything new to the table; "Heavy" gets bogged down with an unremarkable house beat and, worse, an extended orgasm in the breakdown.

For all the precision of his sound design, you get the sense that Crookers isn't quite so adept at actually structuring and sequencing songs. "Belly Button Tickler", featuring a muttered cameo from Mr. MFN eXquire, is damn near interminable, and it's only five minutes long. The trip-hop study "Dangerous" is even more torpid, and the singer MDNT's heavy-breathing clichés ("There's danger inside/ Your lips, your thighs") don't help much. In fact, save the Jeremih-fronted "I Just Can't", all of the album's vocal tracks feel flawed. Musically, "Mark It Up", featuring Beldina, is an exhilarating homage to classic Basement Jaxx, but the narrator's fantasy of smearing lipstick on her boyfriend's collar ("I just wanna mark up my man," goes the chorus) reads like a Cosmopolitan sidebar. "Get Excited", featuring the Philly rapper STS, is a pro-forma strip-club jam. And then there's "Strokin'", a brassy co-production with the Los Angeles "bounce" producer TJR, in which the Bay Area rapper Antwon walks us through a night that starts with a gram and a half and finishes in the 69 position: "Then she did some shit that you couldn't believe/ The booty in my face sucked the life up outta me." Well, OK, then.

It's missteps like that one that suck the life out of Sixteen Chapel—an album whose name presumably comes from its 16 tracks, even though three of those are obvious filler sketches. (One of those, meanwhile, is just a snippet of audio ripped from "No No No Cat", which at least feels like an appropriate response to "Strokin'".) By the album's closing track—"Ghetto Guetta", a punchline masquerading as a song that first premiered nearly a year and a half ago—Crookers has long since worn out his welcome.

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