Discodeine - Discodeine

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  • The dusty loops and open-shirted facial hair and turned-out obscurities of latter-day disco revivalism have been used up pretty good over the past few years by Pilooski and Pentile. So together they vow to move on. You can sense they're a little anxious—the self-titled album by Discodeine, the duo's working name, is clearly cognizant of its own lineage. The music is ultra-classicist: sharp and refined like Chic, robotic and romantic like early Cajual, subtle and user-friendly as early-'80s post-disco and boogie. But it's modest as well as ambitious; you find your way to this album, rather than it going out of its way to knock you out. Which isn't to say Discodeine doesn't have some knockouts. I put "Synchronize" on my RA ballot when it came out as a DFA 12-inch this past December, but time just deepens and sharpens it. Part of the initial charge of the song was simply the idea of Jarvis Cocker singing zinging-strings disco—at last!—and subsequent listening convinces me that the thing itself is even better than the idea. "Grace" is an effortlessly stylish cross between Brazilian samba, Smith N' Hack's "To Our Disco Friends" and something Darrell Calker, the composer for animator Walter Lantz in the 1940s, might have cooked up for a fight scene in a Woody Woodpecker short, its fuse a hammering piano line played on the keyboard's far left. Matias Aguayo features on the album's opener, "Singular," whose synth-and-African-percussion combo, followed closely by the percussion-and-chant-focused "Fallkenberg," sound together like a far more polished take on something you'd expect from Compass Point Studio, circa 1982. There is by definition something slightly hermetic about this kind of perfectionism—yes, "D-A" is a to-the-letter Alan Parsons Project ballad, but do we need another one of those? (The title stands for "drunken angel"—a phrase too embarrassing to spell out, but singing it is OK, apparently.) But that track does point up the blue streak running through the album; it's slightly melancholy even when the track urges you to celebrate, as on "Ring Mutilation." Maybe it's the massed buzzes that eventually become unsettling as they swarm about at higher pitches; maybe it's the affectless "ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah" refrain. Unpacking it takes a while. Letting it sink in helps.
  • Tracklist
      01. Singular feat. Matias Aguayo 02. Falkenberg 03. D-A feat. Baxter Dury 04. Antiphonie 05. Ring Mutilation 06. Depression Skint 07. Grace 08. Homo-Compatible 09. Relaps 10. Invert 11. Synchronize feat. Jarvis Cocker 12. Figures In A Soundscape
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