Matthew Dear Leave Luck to Heaven

• Words: Philip Sherburne
• Label: Ghostly
• XLR8R Rating: /10

Gone are the days when US fans of minimal techno and microhouse had to emigrate to Montreal or Berlin to keep up with the state of the genre. We've got our very own hero in Ann Arbor's Matthew Dear, whose debut album for Ghostly, hot on the heels of a handful of singles for Ghostly's sublabel Spectral (in addition to records as False for M-nus and Jabberjaw for Perlon), practically reinvents the genre in a single stroke. Or make that a series of strokes. Leave Luck to Heaven tackles the Perlon-patented jitterbug chug, the post-Detroit analog patina, and the spirited pop-techno of Kompakt and Playhouse. "Dog Days," with its singalong chorus, is one of the year's best singles on or off the dancefloor. If you can't get with this record, you're not only out of heaven's luck-in the words of track 10, "you're fucking crazy."