ALBUM REVIEWS
|
|
ALBUM REVIEWS |
|
Filthy Dukes
NONSENSE IN THE DARK FICTION 16.3.09 @www.vanguard-online.co.uk
Oh yeah! Nonsense In The Dark in oh, so many ways. An adrenaline-fuelled stomping beast of dance rhythms that pays little homage to common sense and conventions. Likewise the promotional materials that hope to encourage positive reviews from reviewers. It boasts the album was recorded on the mixing desk Conny Plank worked on with Krautrock luminaries Kraftwerk. Er, not sure what difference that would make to anything……. “She’s so lost inside this rhythm” announces the opening track. And they’re right. The beat is pretty gripping and only gets more so. Inhabiting all sorts of dance genres, the emphasis is always on the storming beat, laying it down on the drums and keyboards. Filthy Dukes are a trio and have simply drafted in guest vocalists like Orlando Weeks of The Maccabees and Brandon Curtis of Secret Machines to help dress up the obsessive beat. Elevator combines plaintive vocal tones and a pattern deeply inspired by Kraftwerk. What Happens Next, the third track borrows from all sorts of squelchy dance glam stuff. Add in the childrens choir and it gets really silly. You Better Stop is a four-to-the-floor stomper and Messages could have jumped from some time ten or twenty years back, fusing pop call and response structure with electro glam drawing on old Human League records filtered through a Chicago lens. Tupac Robot Club Rock jumps the shark into a world of madness, a DJ voice inciting us to “c’mon, c’mon” as the beat gets bigger and bigger. The title track has the halting and broken stumbling voice of Orlando Weeks. It’s a slower track, a love song to relax a little on before the onslaught of the rest of the album. Pretty soon we’re back on robotic rhythms, like Cul-De-Sac, where swooshing synths recall the flashing cars on Kraftwerk’s seminal Autobahn while sequencers refer to Yello, the crazed Swiss duo. And so it goes. Big beats, things that make you stomp the floor or wave your arms around and point at things. Seeing as the deranged Tupac Robot Club Rock was all over the radio at the end of last year, this disc doesn’t need my praise and will be out there conquering the world already. It made we twitch like a fool and the beats are like needles under my skin. The melodic structure isn’t strong enough to see it become a classic of future decades like its mentors but, for now, this is dance party record of the moment. www.filthydukes.com |
