No Eyed Bird

Forget what you think you know about electronic music and enjoy something different and refreshing yet freakishly familiar. The Dino Soars offers laid back hip hop beats alongside some sugary dance tracks inspired by the hot days of disco where music wasn’t held back by genres or being typecast as ‘electronic’ ‘indie’ and therefore limited to a esoteric musical audience. For Stegosaurus Rex, every listener is equal and he offers audible appetizers in this, his first of many albums to come. Instead of releasing 4 individual EP albums, this mega CD compiles and mixes them all into something almost random at times, with wild mood swings and gentle downtime.

Listen closely to his single on the album, track #13 “Nowhere To Run” and you may notice similarities to Ladytron’s “Seventeen”, but scarier still is its connection to Crystal Castles and their track “Crimewave“. While the self-titled Crystal Castles album was released one month earlier than The Dino Soars, the single “Nowhere to Run” had been out 2 years earlier as a single. Whether or not they took any influence from the track is inconsequential in the end because the two bands are obviously contemporaries with roots following back to Ladytron, Miss Kitten, and likely Kraftwerk. When asked of the similarities between the tracks however, Steg Rex comments, “I didn’t know who Crystal Castles was 2 years ago when they friended me on Myspace, after I had released the Nowhere To Run Single.” So it is possible that Stegosaurus Rex inspires bands like Crystal Castles. Either way, each band shoots off into different directions as Rex moves into the French inspired disco house realm with amazing cuts like “Fleeting Disco Do” and “Polar”. One of my personal favorites is “Mike Myers”, inspired by Michael Myers Halloween series, its IDM leanings have me respecting Steg Rex’s wide array of musical taste. Check out the video for Nowhere to Run on Youtube.

-johnny darko

Mr. Oizo, is smart if anything, signing with the explodingly famous Ed Banger records, run by the former manager of Daft Punk. Not that Mr. Oizo needs any boosting from the label’s success of MTV acts like Justice, because Mr. Oiza, aka French music producer (and recent filmaker) Quentin Dupieux has been making international hits since 1999 when he had electro beats featured in Levi’s commercials. He’s been cleaver enough to remix Scissor Sisters, & Cassius, and on this release, he reworks the track “Do It At The Disco” by Gary’s Gang, calling his work Patrick122. Dupieux has a sickly dry, yet immature sense of humor, much like Wesley Willis with a prior track called “Last Night a DJ Killed My Dog” and an upcoming track for his new album called “Bruce Willis is Dead.” This disc is electro disco loopy magic, narrated by a robotic voice, the self-declared reincarnation of Michael Jackson. “Transexual” is slightly dark and mysterious underneath its pop beat hard candy shell. Inside is something even scarier. It’s a whole race of A sexual, bi sexual transsexuals, and dare I even say, the final evolution of human sexuality, TRI-sexuals!

-johnny darko

Yet another offering of electro from the French label Kitsune Music, German duo Jens Moelle and Ismail Tuefekci (Digitalism) adds a bit of power-pop flavor to the wider genre of electro-house with the CD album release Idealism. With Daft Punk’s experimentation of using less sample-based production in favor of more synths, Digitalism carries the ball further, using synths to replace the traditional role of guitars without being as abrasive as their predecessors. For example, track 3 “I Want, I Want” is a jangly post-punk little number, complete with that classic drumset groove, divorcing the sound from the hold of drum machines that dominates the whole electro-house genre. Track 7 “Pogo” on the other hand, sounds like a poppier Joy Division song, reminding one of The Killers with its power-pop straight rock drive, and 1/8 note basslines. The duo even manages to touch upon the sounds of 80s New Romantic with track 12 “Apollo-Gize.” However, even apart from the virtuosity of extracting the essential nostalgia of the 80s, Moelle and Tuefekci really bring that magical groove that is so necessary to disco-variations. Track 5 “Digitalism In Cairo” shows off the duo’s skills in chopping up samples, and track 14 “Jupiter Room” just lays down a humongous house groove epitomizing the electro-house style. In all, Digitalism’s release Idealism is a danceable, yet melodic piece of work.

Digitalism - Pogo (YouTube Video)

Producer Simon Smart’s project Sonanaut is focused on music that could be classified as ambient house/acid jazz chillout. Not quite as funky as Ninja Tune (acid jazz), nor as mainstream-sounding as Naked Music (deep house), and certainly not as experimental as Eno (experimental ambient), Smart crafts music that rests between all of these genres, incorporating clean, layered soundscapes along with some dubby beats and slow, sludgy trip-hop sonic aesthetics. In addition, he samples other sources to link to the bigger musical community. Track 8 “Don’t You Know?” is quite possibly the best one on Sinking Upwards, and brings together beautiful electronic drumbeats, phased-and-filtered synthesizers, and complex harmonies, into a piece reminiscent of some of Morgan Geist’s more abstract work. Through Smart’s smooth movements and transitions between tracks, we hear rehashes of musical themes that make up the core of previous tracks on the CD, bringing compelling coherence to the entire release. This is definitely good music for chillout fans, and many others will be interested in the collection of Sonanaut music videos as well.