Armand Van Helden: Gandhi Khan

Though most often associated with disco-derived grooves and soul-stirring atmosphere, house music has always had an affinity for the dark side. From the sinister squiggles of early Chicago acid-house to the wailing sirens of hardcore rave music, house's tight four-to-the-floor rhythm can mutate from amniotic warmth to a chilling thud with the simple shift of a sound filter. Armand Van Helden is an acknowledged master of such subtle shades of inflection. On his last album, Killing Puritans, he seemed hell-bent on reminding the house scene of its potential for menace, making his message clear with a horrific cover image of a toddler brandishing a machine gun. Gandhi Khan falls along similar lines, with Van Helden adopting an ill-timed militant character role as "Gandhi Khan, the disco Don, got turntables from Pakistan." Like its predecessor, the album features flashes of brilliance interspersed with Van Helden's weak spot for frustratingly clownish contrariety. Taking cues from the most chest-pounding wings of hip-hop, Van Helden tops most of his tracks with raps that celebrate his bad self. On the title track, he flows over a spookily banging beat, rapping about "a dance-floor killing spree" and dropping lines like, "Ass is my vice, and I like it tight / So grab your girl before I download on her site." Typically, Gandhi Khan's production is more accomplished than Van Helden's mostly mindless rhymes. "I Can Smell U" is a relentlessly pounding thumper that lurks around the visceral shudder of a full-footed bass kick. Elsewhere, Van Helden builds tracks into raw likenesses of Daft Punk's sweeping grandeur. Too often, however, his efforts to strip house music of its sheen sound clunky (the skipping-CD interruptions in "The Robots Are Cumming") or forced (the uneasy marriage of house and death metal on "Heed The White Seed"). Gandhi Khan features its fair share of potential anthems, but finding them can be dirty work.