 |
DAT Politics - Wow Twist The Graffiti Research Lab in NY has perfected something called “LED Throwies”. As they describe it, they are “an inexpensive way to add color to any ferromagnetic surface in your neighborhood. A Throwie consists of a lithium battery, a 10mm diffused LED and a rare-earth magnet taped together.” What this amounts to is an easily accessible electromagnetic “graffiti” that can be tossed around like rice at a wedding, or like the flickering panoply of pastel papers from a violently dashed piñata. On their website, they feature movies with casual citizens hurling them onto walls in effortless acts joy and irreverence, as each person makes the world that much more playful, polychromatic, day-glo and strange, coating the world around them with a bioluminescent epidermis of lights that hang like the glittering debris of a world more silly and daring than ours. I mention this because this is how the group DAT Politics sounds, and since they are the type of band whose idiosyncratic worlds easily exhaust the thesaurus of even the most ardent music reviewer, I thought a visual would help.
DAT Politics are a trio of musicians who create and perform entirely with laptops, based in Lille, France. They are also the best laptop “band”, if such a category even exists, in the world. Their reliance on endless performance, collaboration and constant experimentation gives the madly disparate elements at work in their music an irrational, and giddy cohesion. Always perverse, wicked and calculating, DAT Politics’ music is the sharp, precise, detached kind of frenetic electronica that, if executed by anyone else, would sound cold and academic. But, as evidenced in songs like 2003’s Pass Our Class—a memo from a college professor read straight through and turned into a bubble machine hued super-powered teenage girly rock cheerleading anthem—they are way more fun than that.
After 2003’s absolutely brilliant full-length Plugs Plus—an intensely sexy record, filled to brimming with sexy chantonesque hooks and fluorescent, polychromatic crescendos made for an art school party in the year 2320—DAT put out a second full-length in 2004 called Go Pets Go on the Chicks on Speed label. The record dove into pleasant ideas, flavors, colors and perceptions, many circling around the world of children. Whereas Plugs Plus was an unrestrained and unapologetic explosion of ideas, Go Pets Go entered fully rendered sonic villages and took the time to explore them; stretching them out and visiting every shivering blade of grass and speck of pollen floating through the air of their candy coated hills. Tracks like Bees are Bees for instance, took the task of exploring the tiny-ness, pleasantness and pure buzzing simplicity of visiting an array of colorful flowers all day, every day, forever.
Wow Twist, however, is a return to energetic, impatient, whiz-bang electronica, with an added sense of accessibility and easily digested melodies. This is easily the catchiest DAT Politics record—not that I’ve never had songs like Taut Bleu suck in my head before, but the densely layered, labyrinthine production of such tracks required way too much cerebral RAM to be looped endlessly in the brain on the subway or driving to work. Wow Twist, however, presents its quirky pop songs with no obstructions, road blocks or honey-hewed detours: this is DAT rocking the fuck out.
The opening Viper Eyes starts off with pulsating thumping rhythms of a punk song, and Gaetan emphatically screams lyrics that sound too awesome to be bound common sense: “Living dead are in the place! And they’re completely amazed! By the sound and the flashlights!” The chorus screams: “No, I don’t mind!”
On Turn my Brain off, the trio produce what is the closest they’ve ever come to a traditional pop song, in that the catchy lyrics actually relate simple, universal feelings and emotions. “T-t-t-t-today, I think I have enough now. So can you please, turn my brain off?” There’s even a bridge and everything! WTF, DAT? Because they always lay adjacent to a point rather than point to it, the track is more of a geek-punk exploration of what pop songs look like—as if the crayon colored trio fell into one after pushing too hard on the wand of a pixilated fairy—and, like the Rugrats or Muppet Babies of electronica, make a big awesome fucking mess of it while trying to figure out what it is.
My favorite song, Gravity, is a pop song that delivers lyrics that are neither nonsensical, nor entirely coded with meaning. Like all great pop songs, the lyrics have an ambiguous floss that poetically connects with the meanings that it happens to strike by accident. The chorus; “Learn something about gravity”, is delivered with a tone of loving, wise advice. It could refer to the process of humbling oneself, or moving on from a traumatic experience through humor, but it really shouldn’t have to mean anything for it to feel amazing. Lines like “you’re not so fast with them fast shoes!” are so awkward, cute, and defiant that they linger around emotional relevance without actually situating itself there: instead, we just laugh that “fast shoes” could exist.
The band still boldly wear their most overtly lit signifiers like warm comfortable fur coats, using clunky technology as a recurring theme on tracks like the dorkily anthemic What’s DAT?, the surreal My Toshiba is Alive, and the repetitive, chanting siren song that is V.I.D.E.O. Tape, a speak and spell cheerleader chant in which the trio somehow spells the word “Video” incorrectly for four minutes.
Clocking in at a tragically short 36 minutes, Wow Twist contains more energy than most bands deliver in a lifetime, exploring weirder angles and more foreign geometries than most mathematicians experience in pursuit of a degree, and more impish wonder than most daycare centers have the Prozac to handle. With this record, it’s clear that the trio aren’t just creating a sound that’s structurally complex, quirky, and unique, but that they’ve sharpened their process to a science. Their sound has developed around performance, interaction with their audience, and a love of what sounds do to people rather than just a love of sound. The result is one of the best pop records I’ve heard in a long time—if I play this record at a house party and no one dances, I’m kicking everyone out immediately and asking them how much it cost to put their soul and sense of humor in self-storage, so I can see about putting my disappointment with humanity there. You should do the same...
|
