Nonwrestler Blog

22 April 2008

Weekly MP3 #1: Dntel - The Distance

I decided to do something like the Friday music posts on Look Out, He’s Got A Knife

but for whatever reason am going with only legally available stuff. Thought I’d start with some tracks from my favourite albums of last year.

Right, action...

This song and the title track from Dumb Luck are available for download from Better Propaganda

.

'The Distance' is a boy / girl country song based around a curious, deceptively detailed electronic arrangement. I was going to write deceptively rad, but I think its radness is up front from the opening moment. It's a pity to hear the song out of context, because it's preceded by an even more country song (with vox by Jenny Lewis

of Rilo Kiley

) that ends in such a way that this tune initially sounds like some kind of coda.

The vocals on this one are by Arthur & Yu

, who I dutifully checked out (they toured while I was living in Tokyo) but found fairly boring in their natural habitat. It's the contrast of the style of song with its setting that I like so much, when it's back to a bit of guitar and a tambourine I lose interest...

Dntel himself is a guy called Jimmy Tamborello

. Dumb Luck is his second album (bar a collection of demos) and a switch to Sub Pop

from one of my fave labels, Plug Research

. Jimmy's band The Postal Service provided Sub Pop with their biggest seller since signing Nirvana in the 90s, so I guess the label was eager to jump on his next solo effort.

One thing that I guess makes me love Dntel is that what he's doing is the kind of territory I ordinarily find fairly barren. The musically conservative, smug world of contemporary US indie meets the cosy, all-vitality-subsumed world of 90s UK electronica. Ain't no party like a bourgeois party!

In Dntel's case the music remains fairly outside the gestures of either the soft and easy-listening end of pop electronica (some things on Morr Music

for example) or microsound / clicks & cuts type stuff (I'm thinking of things like Gel: / Dorine Muraille

or So

or some of the things on 12K

and its Happy sublabel). It is pretty big and lush sounding in a lot of ways, but often involving elements wandering a bit out of time or pitch, with lots of keening tones, distant clatters and scuffs, and even (gasp) genuine surprises.

Labels: music, weekly mp3