Just when you think you can't possibly stand to hear another electronic group that dances coyly over the line between indie and club culture, The Whip comes along and slices that notion to bits. Updating electro, pop and disco-house for the not-so-new-anymore millenium, The Whip delve into dark, driving music that's off-handedly sexy.
If L'Trimm dated Crystal Castles and moved their hot lil' relationship to the dancefloor, they'd have a kid called Hearts Revolution, who are a disco-tastic melange of candy-coated 8-bit sounds, fuzzy child-like vocals, and lovable electro-pop.
Modular artist and London transplant Lady Hawke is what the world should have heard before all that over hyped Lady Gaga garbage. Coquettishe like Le Tigre and sly on the synths like Goldfrapp, Lady Hawke is one to keep an eye on with her electrified dance-floor burners.
Bloc Party and Vampire Weekend are indie rock's premier polyrhythmicists (it sounds like it's spelled). Britain's Friendly Fires now enter the fray with their own drum shiftiness, and almost outdo the Party on alienation points with dense guitar clouds and strained vocals.
A remarkable set of rhythmic traditions collides in this San Francisco group's stuff. In a typical track, cool Latin lilts will be bent beyond recognition via dark synth tones and hard house backings. They're all things you dance to--but how do you dance to all at once?
One of the busiest men in contemporary techno, producer, remixer, and Ann Arbor's saving grace Matthew Dear is out with another studio album, "Asa Breed," exploring boldly beyond the genre's stiff boundaries: it's ambient in spots, roams into shoegazer territory, and has a weird electro-pop strut.
When New York's DFA Records came barreling down the hipster pipeline in the early 00's, it seemed as though none of its artists could top founder James Murphy's snotty electro-rock band LCD Soundsystem. But if anything, the Juan Maclean (which is one guy) easily rolls in a close second. This comes as a bit of a surprise because, unlike LCD, TJM's jerky Krautrock-inspired electro gets pretty abstract. The story goes that Murphy, who'd previously produced Maclean as Six Finger Satellite, convinced the rehabilitated and recently relocated artist to make music again after a long bout with addiction. The rest, as they say, is (disco) history, man.
The house-driven late punk of the DFA was missing but one thing: social consciousness. Holy Hail have it. Are they the perfect band? We exaggerate... slightly. Irrepressible beats are given soul with funkier bass lines and heart with high-moral lyrics.
This Vancouver act has more than just exclamation points in common with the Go! Team. The group shows a piercing punk patina, but like GT, their violence is on the scale of, say, roller derby. Ultimately, dancing is the purpose of all the sharp guitars, rabid vocals, and soul-style rumbles.
If you want to remain still--at your desk, at your job, in your car--then stay away from Pendulum. Errant shards of synthetic sounds whiz past your head as the mechanical pulse of drum 'n' bass collides with the sensual weightlessness of the female voice, and the processed beats move steadily forward. It's a continuous current of erotic poetry revealing a futurescape of robotic, ecstatic sound.
