all fantastic music ever created, the crowd. Cackhand, ourselves.
Sounds Like
On the surface this Danish trio may seem like latecomers to the disco-punk revival that LCD Soundsystem and the Rapture mined so successfully. But repeated listening reveals Who Made Who are no mere Gang of Four copyists and that there is more to their musical palette than cowbells, woodblocks and angular bass-lines.
Experts in house music, jazz and garage rock, the triumvirate eschew convention and succeed in bashing square pegs through round holes. The Loop is vintage acid house albeit with some jungle drums and a crashing surf guitar conclusion, while Hello, Empty Rooms morphs from the awkward and off-key into an electro-pop delight Mylo fans would warm to. Small Wonders recalls a slide guitar-happy Beck, and there's even a histrionic rock cover of Benny Benassi's techno hit Satisfaction. More impressive still, Who Made Who are not only sonically adventurous, their songs are witty and more pop than punk. This unique debut is not only hip, it's also highly hummable.
Who Made Who are a Danish trio bent on playing disco non-ironically. I don’t know how they came across this idea (though the queer subtext in most of the songs is a clue), why they’re essaying it when the idea is already stale, or where they got their vision of “disco” from. But Who Made Who is a weird album. I don’t quote press releases very often, but here’s what they’re saying about themselves: “Not connecting [disco] with (Post) Punk and New Wave like so many other bands right now - here the influences come from a wider range of music: from surf to folk to funk to pop with a Big Dose of Italodisco but without being cheesy”. Right, well, the “big dose of Italodisco” seems to have taken over this record, because it’s all I hear. Although I admire the balls of a band that tries disco played “live” in the studio, in the end the spaces are two big, the songs too small, and we’re left with just a high-momentum bass line.
To the band’s credit, the songs are arranged in decreasing order of quality. So the opener, “Rose”, explodes in your face with its galloping bass riff (think of Bill Wyman’s work on “Emotional Rescue”, and you’ll get the idea), while the closer, “Green Dogs”, sounds like a sad demo with an epic synthesizer plus a violin. Meanwhile, we can move to “Got to Be There” (sadly, not a Michael Jackson cover), the monks-poured-outta-Copenhagen groove of “Space for Rent”, and good ol’ fret-spanking “Johnny Lucky”. Vocals are somewhere between multi-tracked Pink Floyd and bad attempts to hit Bee Gees notes. Synthesizers are cheesy as hell, which I dig, but the porn film soundtrack ethos pokes its head out from between the sheets. On the whole, they are conjuring up something more akin to Men Without Hats or Mr. Mister than the disco, but hell, if QTV hires ‘em for soundtrack programming I might endorse the whole game. But this record just doesn’t do it. Word on the street is they’re dynamite live, and I bet some of these songs do come off as unhinged party tunes when the flesh hits the stage. Still, most people will forget these songs too quickly to care.
I think Who Made Who can be summed up by paraphrasing the Smiths: You go, and you stand on your own. And you leave on your own. And you go home, and you spoon, and you want to sigh.
(And no, I can’t get the old AC/DC song out of my head every time I say their name either.)
le 5 Décembre aux CHAMPS LIBRES (Rennes) Concert-performance en 5.1 avec Fabrice Tison (ingé son Yan Tiersen …) Renseignements : Champs Libres : +33 2 23 40 66 00 http://agenda.leschampslibres.fr/ Les TRANS Tél : +33 (0) 299 311 210 www.lestrans.com
Online Now!