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Pier pressure
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by ERIK LEIJON If digested while half-listening to their MySpace page or rapidly clicking through a British music Web site playlist, Nottingham electro-rock quartet Late of the Pier wouldn’t seem all that much different from their retro-indebted U.K. contemporaries. After sitting through their outrageous and strangely visionary debut album Fantasy Black Channel, it becomes evident these early 20-somethings have taken an axe to traditional CD pacing, mashing up their own songs and shifting musical genres every minute as if they were Girl Talk’s live band desperately trying to keep up. “We compiled the album together as if it were a DJ collage, rather than traditional mixing. We whacked one song on top of another like an amateur DJ would,” says bassist Andrew Faley. “The album’s pacing has a very unnatural flickering—it’s almost satirical. It just hits these brick walls of sounds and turns around.” Fantasy Black Channel began as traditional compositions steeped in ’80s new wave, ’70s progressive rock, glam rock, rave, house and classic Britpop, but the final product has the attention span of a teenage girl rifling through her iPod collection at breakneck speed. It makes sense the album has been hailed in their native land as a druggie nu-rave record, although Faley contends the record’s quick-shifting “smashing panes of glass” feeling wouldn’t make a good accompaniment for most narcotics. It does seem like a forward-thinking way of conceiving an album capable of retaining the attention of your modern, ADD-afflicted listener, used to being their own private DJ. In another nod to their mash-up tendencies, the album was covertly spackled with copyrighted samples of popular songs pulverized to the point where no one has even noticed. “There are samples of some pretty big bands on there, but they’ve been recycled so many times, and parts were re-recorded. We felt, after hearing what was left, are the people who even wrote the original music going to notice the samples? The fact they’re so chopped up, there’s an argument to be made that even if someone does recognize them—which I don’t think is going to happen—it is kind of yours now.” WITH THE WHIP AT LES SAINTS TONIGHT, |
