Boys Noize

Boys Noize is Alexander Ridha, a young Berlin producer practicing the kind of over-muscular electro house that has paid off so rewardingly for the Ed Banger crew. Ridha began releasing singles in 2004 on DJ Hell’s International Deejay Gigolo Records and then moved on to Anthony Rother’s Datapunk, Tiga’s Turbo and his own Boys Noize imprint. The combination of all those labels should be enough to describe Boys Noize’s brand of fist-pumping productions to anyone who hasn’t heard them. However, the drawback with Ridha is that he brings absolutely nothing individual to the burgeoning genre. His debut album, Oi Oi Oi, is a collection of by-the-numbers club bangers. They rock, sure, but they’re vacuous and they lack the focusing vision of a Justice, the percussive talents of a DJ Medhi, or even the minimal signatures of Teutonic precursors like T. Raumschmiere or Canuck expat Sid le Rock. Boys Noize will largely appeal to fans of Justice already hungry for more of those quasi-religious synth organ melodies and adrenalin-boosting electro riffs. To anyone else, Oi Oi Oi isn’t worth it.