Planetary Assault Systems ‎– Straight Shooting

Fresh off much essen­tial re-issues of his sem­i­nal debut album for Peace­frog, ​‘The Elec­tric Funk Machine’, and the ini­tial­ly 2017-released ​‘The Light Years Reworks’, which fea­tured an incred­i­ble cast of remix­ers, UK tech­no mas­ter­mind Luke Slater resur­faces as Plan­e­tary Assault Sys­tems with a crisp dou­ble-pack­age of his sig­na­ture deep-rolling, hyp­not­ic big-room churn­ers. As its name sug­gests, ​‘Straight Shoot­ing’ takes no byway to get its point across. 
 
Lift­ing off with the bleepy, out­er­spacey thrust of ​‘Beam Rid­er’, Slater’s new out­ing stings like a straight-out nasty shot of adren­a­line right in the tick­er. Going for the jugu­lar with its ever impact­ful mix of pum­mel­ing kicks, blood­thirsty bass combers and fren­zied elec­tron­ics blink­ing like sig­nals fresh­ly emerged from a long drift across cold, hos­tile worm­holes, PAS fur­ther proves he nav­i­gates in a par­al­lel dimen­sion of his own. Although famil­iar in essence, the chas­sis of the tracks remains dis­tinc­tive­ly unique with cuts like ​‘Born Anchors’ and ​‘Engage Now’ mov­ing away from the cal­i­brat­ed num­ber cat­e­go­ry, whilst fine­ly blur­ring the line between explo­sive­ness and self-dis­ci­pline, which makes them per­fect for near-peak­time moments of tran­si­tion in a set. 
 
Prop­er mus­cu­lar bangers are nev­er­the­less the ker­nel of it all here, and sure to steer the crowd into ecsta­sy on auto­mat­ic pilot. If ​‘Humans Use Con­crete’ blazes with the wild stomp of Slater’s most inci­sive clas­sics and ​‘Bear Bones’ guides its lis­ten­er into a trip­py excur­sion across hyper­space loops and alien inner ter­ri­to­ries, it’s ​‘Give It Up’ that har­ness­es the storm with its play­ful mix of sliced-and-diced vox frag­ments, rabid toms, skit­tish hats and freq-shift­ing synth whines sure to cut a path of destruc­tion into the club. If an extra-ter­res­tri­al inva­sion of plan­et Earth was on the agen­da, no doubt Slater would be appoint­ed sound­track com­pos­er in chief. Dead­ly as it gets, ​‘Straight Shoot­ing’ holes it in one.