Does It Offend You, Yeah?

Reading: Paris-Sur-Le-M25, home to fake Frenchie Jacques Lu Cont and now also chez DIOYY?. They’ve conspired to cram everything that’s banging about French house right now (ie your head, heaving with Ed Banger static care of Justice, SebastiAn, Busy P) into something a bit more Anglo-Klaxon; something that’s spent more time drinking cider outside ASDA than its continental cousin. And thereby they mash the cliché of ‘dance-rock’ into a sound that genuinely subsists in both worlds but belongs to neither. On the one hand, ‘We Are Rockstars’ is Daft Punk skidding all over the place. Shorn of the fine lines and elegant rhythmic equipoise [Now Haynes, does this look like Dictionary Corner to you? – Ed], what remains is a thrillingly drunken robot headbutting the crash cymbal and vomiting a variety of interestingly toxic flavours of cartridge ink. On the other, it’s real punk: a digital Black Francis, displaying real mastery of the soft-loud dynamic. So, yes, a collision of dancefloor and moshpit here, but the title is by no means ironic. In fact, it’s so unironic that it’s the almost the latter-day equivalent of poodle rock. New rave isn’t a shallow attempt to chortle at the hil-a-rious ’80s. It’s artists trying to connect with the maximalism of that decade. They want wilful sensory overload, Caligulan decadence, skyscrapers and strippers and thrusting consumer culture run amok. This is that unadulterated paean to unadulterated power, a love song to adrenaline itself, destined to soundtrack every extreme sports clips shown for the next 12 months. In short, it’s exactly the sort of track you’d pump yourself up with just before you gambled £3.7 billion of Société Générale’s money on the stock exchange, and should therefore be banned before it causes any more harm.
GH