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Wednesday, August 10, 2005
MY FRIEND DARIO
Vitalic
OK Cowboy
PIAS : 2005
[Buy it]
ENRICO
Isolee
We Are Monster
Playhouse: 2005
[Buy it]
PALLADIUM
Alan Braxe and Friends
The Upper Cuts
PIAS : 2005
[Buy it]
In hindsight, it was inevitable. Punk music and dance music have been swapping spit at least since Suicide, James Chance, and ESG, and while it's tempting to try to chart the braided ramifications of the relationship from there, this is a blog, not a book deal. And I've got deadlines today. So we'll stick to the broadest gestures.
What was inevitable? Dance music shaking-off of indie trappings to snap pale, skinny necks in its undiluted form, that's what. The way I see it, a gradual process really picked up steam in the twenty-first century, breaking down something like this:
1. Indie folk start raiding house and disco to give their verse/chorus/verse efforts a little oomph and cross-genre appeal, the dancepunk explosion explodes, cue The Rapture, Radio 4, Out Hud. Vintage post-punk was no stranger to dance music, and whether this new breed was attempting to forge the synthesis anew or just rehashing the synthesis forged by forerunners remains ambiguous. Regardless, a new cliche enters the critical lexicon alongside "angular guitars" and "dramatic departures", every fifth record that gets ink anywhere is "teaching indie kids / hipsters how to dance".
2. Heads start to catch on that the dance music part of the equation is a lot more exciting than the indie part, hence, instead of taking indie punk and throwing some shuffle beats and robotic basslines behind it, the new vanguard flips the script: Start with the banging beats, flavor with guitars or subtle song-oriented structures to taste. Cue LCD Soundsystem and The Juan Maclean.
3. The transition is complete, and honest-to-god dance music (of the songier variety, natch) enters the indie landscape almost by accident. Vitalic, Isolee (Nick Sylvester does a number on Isolee here, particularly regarding the subtle distinctions between dance music and indiefied dance music), and Alan Braxe are drawing rave digital ink in Pitchfork. To our perfectionist readers, sorry for the absent accent from Isolee's name. Blogger isn't so fond of accents. You're welcome to get a wet-erase marker and add it to your screen, it belongs above the first "e".
4. Prediction - Indie fans weaned on French house DJs start making their own jams, get tired of dance music, start to pillage indie rock for jangly guitars and slacker hooks. The process reverses, the ratio slowly inverts, and somehow, improbably but inexorably, we wind up back at Pavement.
posted by Brian
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