Repo

I often espouse the notion that ‘original’ or ‘unique’ are words all too often used in music criticism, yet if there’s one band in the world with a singular voice it’s Black Dice. Despite this, their new album is testament to the fact that even the most innovative of musicians are, at least to a certain extent, indebted to outside sources.

Black Dice have been ardently burrowing their own furrow ever since transcending the doldrums of their tiresome hardcore punk origins with 2002’s beautiful Beaches & Canyons L.P. (which sounds something like Brian Eno’s ambient works through heavy distortion accompanied by a drumkit) and subsequently the band has continued to evolve with each and every release, having recently transformed into something of a defamiliarised motorik mirror of pop music through the ages.

This concept is exemplified in the first track on this new full length, ‘Nite Creme’, wherein a squelchy beat with a rhythm so funky that it wouldn’t feel out of place forming the backbone of a Timbaland track is joined by an equally squelchy Daft Punk-esque arpeggiated synth riff and a yelping voice not unlike Black Dice’s far more mainstream former-label boss, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. Despite all these ingredients apparently making for an altogether accessible stew, the reality is far from the truth. The resulting track is just as disconcerting and alien as anything Black Dice have made in the past and all the elements collapse out of time midway through, only for a vocal sample to emerge from the chaos to keep a time quite adverse to the track’s former tempo, a move which I think very few chart-topping musicians would dare to make.

The theme of mainstream elements rendered somewhat uninviting to the unprepared ear is continued throughout this record. For example Whirligig recalls the crate-digging vocal-sample interludes which pepper what is possibly the most critically acclaimed album of the 90s, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, yet I don’t think Shadow ever ended a track in a mass of feedback and noise. ‘Glazin’ is almost entirely based around the kind of sixties pop sample favoured by Panda Bear, yet while the Animal Collective alumni crafts lush transcendental songs around these snippets, Black Dice concoct something far more odd, with the sample joined in stereo by their trademark effects-laden, detuned instrumentation. ‘Earnings Plus Interest’ is a track composed almost entirely of breakbeats straight out of a 90s big beat track by Propellerheads or Fatboy Slim, yet played out of sync with each other.

Admittedly, later on the album loses some of this mimetic quality. For example ‘Chicken Shit’ is a noise jam which only has more similarity to mainstream music forms than other noise music because of its discernible structure (unlike Merzbow and much of his Japanese noise ilk) and lack of Whitehouse-esque overtly wilful offensiveness (ironic considering its name). Despite these deviations, though, the overall defamiliarisation achieved by this record is remarkable. If Burial’s hauntological dubstep is pop music seen through a fog of mournfulness, this is the view from the freakshow.