Rebel Yell: Fall From Grace | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Industrial-dance doyen Rebel Yell is never one to stand still: whether we're referring to the high bpm of her techno jams, her world-wide touring schedule over the last couple of years or the stylistic tweaks she brings to each new release, to keep us all guessing.

Grace Stevenson, as she’s otherwise known, timed that one well, actually. Hitting the UK, Europe and Japan, along with Dark Mofo and Splendour off the back of her debut album, Hired Muscle, before everything got cancelled forever. Hey, you can still release music though and so here’s album number two: Fall From Grace. Not sure about that title, like there’s some unforgivable sin, hidden somewhere in this record. If anything, it seems to be more of a journey of personal discovery, a self-reclamation; perhaps that’s it: you have to get out of yourself, to get back in. Going someway to support this theory, the record kicks off with a veritable meditation session, chaired by no less than Hayden Dunham -miss QT- whose brief but memorable career as an energy-drink magnate and the producer of one promotional single, seems to have burned her on the whole biz. So now she’s a guru, going on a mystical trek with Rebel Yell, in Incredible Heat. “Do you think two entities can live in one form?”, asks Grace and Dunham responds “Is it ever a question of what is more and what is less, when we are one? / Quiet now, I’m with you...” So, right from the beginning, Grace is shooting for those spiritual dimensions of the dancefloor.

It casts Pump, featuring a sultry vocal from Collarbones’ Marcus Whale beyond purely sexy connotations and, again, makes you feel like you’re on a shared, transcendental adventure, set to bangery beats: “Bear witness to this!” Bangery it is, too: like that trek through half the world’s dingy, dark little discos has convinced Rebel Yell to give the punters more of what they want. Listening to Fall, side-by-side with Hired Muscle, it’s not like the elements Grace has always played with have changed, but on the last record there was electroclash here, synthpop there, industrial mayhem crashing through after. Now, it’s like everything is combined: vocals, synths, industrial thudding and high bpm, in anthem after anthem. The synth riffs are fit for purpose too: catchy as hell and each new cut perked my ears up to hear what Grace was going to do with it. Bringing heavy-hitting producer Antonia Gauci on board for recording and mixing as well as Ptwiggs for the mastering, must surely have helped the glossy finish, balancing out the lo-fi tendencies of Stevenson’s roots, which, perhaps, you can hear in the ever more reverberant echoing of the vocals.

All of this makes it the more ironic when you hit lead single Anti-Club Music and its rejection of the discotheque which is, deliberately, more clubby than even the rest of what’s here. “Too. Much. Groove.” Stevenson states sonorously, taking a stand against the tyranny of tech-house bros and, if you watch the video, dancing up a storm in her favourite venue, the out-of-doors with her bush-doof mates. Hitting the club circuit was always going to have downsides.

Whether Fall From Grace is an anthem-machine or not, is, at this point, a little irrelevant. Dance bros are going to be spending more time bitching in chat rooms than dominating dance floors right now. Grace herself has suggested you might use the latest Rebel Yell for a different (presumably much more intense) kind of Youtube, home-aerobic workout. At the very least, the journey to spiritual self-empowerment, wending its way through Fall From Grace feels like the right one for the moment: trying to put out heads back together in the face of … everything! “I’m a power force” proclaims Stevenson on the late album cut of the same name. “You think you can control me, but little do you know…” Not that I think anyone could ever control Rebel Yell, but you can do what the hell you like at the industrial-discotheque in your living room.

- Chris Cobcroft.