DURAN DURAN DURAN Опции

[deniss]

Duran Duran Duran
Very Pleasure
CockRockDisco/Very Friendly; 2004

Duran Duran Duran's Very Pleasure is good for a laugh. Cynics can cackle over their nearly album-long abuse of the "Amen" break, one of electronic music's most exploited beat samples that still somehow sounds fresh when DJ/Producer #2023 tweaks it. Irony-hipsters can magic-mark Duran+2 all over their Paul Frank and Emily Strange mini-backpacks, alongside singing the shoddy sample of a McDonald's commercial announcing: "Holla! McDonald's Big & Tasty is only a dolla!" Nostalgists can reminisce over the virgin year of 2000, when it seemed truly punk to desecrate NWA classics by laptop. Adolescent boys aged 13-43 can rub salt into their sexual frustrations by listening to Duran+2's field recording of what is supposedly an act of fellatio. Very Pleasure is a pile of crap dipped in fool's gold.

A Philadelphian named Ed Flis is the mastermind behind Duran+2; the CockRockDisco website declares, "One might call him the new John Holmes." The music is co-produced by Michael Chiaken and Tony Gabor, and blessed by CockRockDisco owner/trashcore maven/former Donna Summer, Jason Forrest. A majority of Duran+2's debut album resemble remixes of Forrest's vaudeville; they typically graft a familiar sample of a crass pop or hair-metal blurt, and then pulverize it with the sound of a drum machine rolling down a hill in a garbage can. There is nothing subversive here, but enough intelligence exists to warrant a few clever moments.

Opener, "I Hate the 80's" is nothing more than an Amen'd take on the computer-expo funk of Yazoo's "Don't Go"-- good times from dimly lit memories. The stronger "Manrammer" is an essay on the Amen break that deftly compiles virtually every fingerprint laid on that rhythm's call to arms-- the pitch-drops, the street-cleaner blows to the cymbals, the trudges through muck to baffle the dancefloor, the E-addled mood swings, etc. A snippet of Ace of Base's department-store reggae classic, "All That She Wants", figures somewhere in there. "Gaetan" is like a less memorable, less haunting version of Kid606's "My Kitten"-- both songs sounds like a piano ballad that sits in a corner with its head buried in its knees while splintered beats ransack the house.

"Movies Unlimited" could have gone further with its trunk-rattling Miami bass besides having distortion spat on it. "Year of the Monkey" and its inbred second-cousin "Purple Passion" are generic breakcore excursions with a few douses of equally generic, Wagnerian trance-techno synth melodies. Closer "Untitled" insecurely dabbles with busted-lawnmower metal guitar of what sounds like Slayer before falling into the gabber routine.

Very Pleasure's most redeeming moments are the intoxicated raggacore of "Hard Girls" and the McDonald's jingle thrash of "Pilldriver". The latter is a prime example of a whatthefuckwasthat? break that is oddly missing from so much breakcore these days. And then there's the "Interlude", which first sounds like bare feet in mud, but is said to be a close mic'd performance of a national epidemic among American youth that Dr. Phil reminded our president about on his show. It's enough to scare children into abstinence.

-Cameron Macdonald, January 31, 2005

Ресурс: www.pitchforkmedia.com

Сообщение отредактировал DDfans - 10/10.2007 - 11:18