Track Review ⊙ Daily Ops Home
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah :: "Satan Said Dance"From Some Loud Thunder (Wichita; 2007)
So, first, the obvious: the live bootlegs of this song were better. But, like, even calling this a “song” seems slightly tenuous: the track is so dominated by its steamrolling and hypnotic rhythm section that any presentiment of melody is corollary to the indie loophole that the band seems so desperate to claw out of. And if it was just that elastic beat, muscular and sinister, spun out almost effeminately by the subdued bass and unaccentuated snare hits, I think I just might be satisfied. But the boys had to go into the studio and fuck it all up. The penetrating directness and acute stylistic cohesion of their debut is here inverted, involute and collapsed in on its corners, so that the sharp, well-defined edges of angular art-rockers “Heavy Metal” and “Is This Love?” have been laid upon by a sea of impressionistic watercolours, leaving the whole thing sounding more than a little diffuse and anticlimactic for a piece with two asystolic buzzwords in its title.
I suppose that if I were to find a fanboy excuse for enjoying this mess, I’d redundantly comment on how the bleeps were, let’s say, “chaotically mercurial,” or possibly knock out a few sentences on how the abstruse sound manipulation infuses the core material with a careening subconscious gravity. But that would be stupid, because it would be wrong. No, in truth, besides the odd intrigue of hearing a successful aesthetic defiled into a base admixture, the only good thing I can say about the discordant found sounds and gloopy jazz synths is that they effortlessly steal the show from Alec Ounsworth’s trainwreck vocals. Maybe that was the point.
Alan Baban :: 10 January 2007 |
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