NewMusic First Spin: Datarock
August 25th, 2009
“The Blog” is a bold statement to open an album with. A crowd cheers, a robot speaks and then a series of vocal samples waxing about the information highway (MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Napster, iTunes, etc.) set the stage for Datarock to make their grand entrance. It seems a bit ridiculous but that’s Datarock for you.
Still sporting the patented red tracksuits and that wacky sense of humour, Norway’s leading neo-new wavers return four years after they taught us all how to find love at computer camp and got us moving like carefree idiots to “Fa-Fa-Fa.”
Not much has changed with these guys. They still sound like they used their studio time to hold dance-offs, and even if they didn’t, well, Red is certainly an album designed to do that yourself. If you don’t know how, they’ve made a video for the adrenalizing first single “Give It Up” to show you. Hell, they’ve even recorded a song so encouraging that they could only call it “Dance!”
Somehow, they’ve even captured the zeitgeist with a very New Romantic song called “Molly,” which not only pays tribute to the famous redheaded Ringwald, but also the recently deceased John Hughes, a man who would certainly have used Datarock on a soundtrack 25 years ago. How’s that for timing?!
Just as kitschy is “True Stories,” a funky number that’s not only written entirely using song titles from the Talking Heads’ songbook (Google it and see for yourself!), but also sounds an awful lot like David Byrne’s former crew.
But those are the type of tongue-in-cheek gags we expect from a band that’s known just as much for their break-dancing skills and piss-taking humour as they are for their actual music. But no worries, there’s plenty of actual music to enjoy on Red.
Listen to it here
Artist: Datarock
Album:Red
Release Date: September 1, 2009
Label: Nettwerk
Genre: Electronic
Author: Cam Lindsay
First Spin Live Until: September 8, 2009
Track Listing:
- The Blog
- Give It Up
- True Stories
- Dance!
- Molly
- Do It Your Way
- In The Red
- Fear Of Death
- Amarillion
- The Pretender
- Back In The Seventies
- Not Me
- New Days Dawn
Tags: Datarock, first spin
Posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 4:02 pm by Klye and is filed under The New Music.
