Drugged-out jungle
jams and dirty disco

by JACK OATMON

I moved to Montreal from a steaming pit at the bottom of a jungle valley 100 kilometres from anything but twittering crawlies, water snakes and delicate rainbow blossoms. And it was hot. Real fucking hot. And sweaty all day and all night long all year. There were maybe five phones in the village, a couple of buildings with intermittent power and no real pavement to speak of.

But the crackling heat and rampant wilderness were punctuated by one unusual resident. The Internet. Computers. I trekked across Central America for months to find this unimaginable throwback where folks speak a 5,000-year-old dialect of a Mayan language, and they’ve got Google. No phones, little potable water, 14-hour work days and a wire that brings their isolated world the condensed, catalogued philosophical spoils of our world, instantaneously. Why am I telling you this? I’m telling you this because every time I put this new Poni Hoax album on, that’s all I can think about.

OLD, NEW AND CAPTIVATING: Poni Hoax

The great technological contradiction. The Internet in a tropical backwater. The spot where the visceral doubt and conflict of the human forebrain meet the synaptic clockwork of digital culture. That’s what France’s Poni Hoax of Tigersushi Records seem to have crystallized in a way few other bands can. It’s gritty, spastic and damaged, but it’s also refined, beautifully arranged and captivatingly realized. The morbid howling of Nicolas Ker string along Laurent Bardainne’s crisp synths and melancholy songwriting while Nicolas Villebrun’s guitar evokes David Byrne and Lou Reed in equal measure, all spread across a gamut of grooves from disco to chamber pop. Overall, Images of Singrid, the follow-up to their fantastic self-titled debut, is a haunting, precise mixture of new and old, and easily one of the most captivating albums of the year. So go see them tonight, July 3, at Club Soda, so you don’t have to kick yourself later when Pitchfork and blogland and big glossy mags catch up and turn them into a thing. And get really smashed and desperate and stinking with sweat so you can properly appreciate the creepy, modern downward spiral these guys have painstakingly distilled into rock form for you.

Which leads me to Friday, a day in which we seek not horrific technological orchestration but sanguine, saccharine escapism. Disco, disco, disco. Rub ‘n’ Tug member, DFA recording artist, Fabric resident, Still Going member, NYC party guru, blah blah blah blah blah—nice CV aside, Eric Duncan might just be your main man on the wax this Friday night as he visits Zoobizarre alongside lovable torchbearers of the groove, Why Alex, Why?, Dave Shaw and Davey Lahteenmaa. Expect no lethargic soles, no weary souls and no rest for the wicked. This guy has the funk and you want it, not to mention that he joins some boys who know their tunes like villagers know search engines. Summertime is thoroughly upon us and the jams abound left and centre, so let’s have a little dance, shall we? If the tribesmen can read Wikipedia, then surely we can go native to freaky forest funk.

ASK ME ABOUT SCORPION SHOOING TACTICS
AND CATCHING WILD TARANTULAS…jack.oatmon@gmail.com