E=MC²

As much pull as he’d earn producing records for others throughout the ’70s, Giorgio Moroder aimed to end the decade just as he’d started it: drawing on his bubblegum origins to cut catchy electronic pop songs with his own voice taking the lead. The difference from his “Son of My Father” years, of course, was that over the course of that decade he engineered the axis-shifting computerworld epiphany of his production on Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” in ’77 and the Kraftwerk-gone-euphoric of his elaborations on that sound later in the year with From Here to Eternity. So 1979’s E=MC² is where he went when he had nowhere else to go but a potentially infinite up. As a singer, Moroder is a thoroughly bizarre entity here, plugging into his most cybernetic affects with a Vocoder-tinged falsetto that sounds like a cross between an army of overdubbed Gibbs and a servo motor. (The result: some of the oddest sounding declarations of the word “wow” thinkable.) But at the peak of “disco sucks” sentiment, Moroder and co-producer Harold Faltermeyer seemed to take that phrase as if it referred to the inner workings of a supercar’s turbocharger, and helped set the stage for the ensuing decade’s synthpop takeover with their own Hi-NRG innovations — “Baby Blue,” “What a Night” and “If You Weren’t Afraid” in particular — that found out how complex you can make a jittery melodic sequence while still hewing close to a direct rhythmic simplicity. It gets even more compellingly bizarre when things takes a detour from Side 1’s uptempo mode to toy with twitchy new wave funk (“I Wanna Rock You”), space-lover Euro-soul balladry (“In My Wildest Dreams”), and a titular closer that nods to YMO’s next-level proto-techno wizardry while a robot reads the album credits to you.