‘And as it spills fluidly into Me And Giuliani Down By The School Yard (A True Story) Offer falls into we, the pool of dampened body, once again. “I wanna sing an old song! Well, not really, but I’ll do it for you” he says unseen. One senses he’d do anything for us were it defined under the banner of entertainment and though tonight abridged, it effervesces great animation as it stands an infallible paradigm of their hybridised powers. The post-punk guitars; the resonant undertones of house music; the My Sharona soundalike breakdown; ever heavy drums; a bass line protuberant as Tim Harrington’s paunch. It’s all there, and it’s all a positive THR!!!’
‘Having pitstopped at a humid rap/ house hybrid for Slyd – the preliminary peep into THR!!!ER, the forthcoming fifth from Sacramento dance-punks !!! – Nic Offer et al. this time clamber aboard a Soul Train revivalism for the irrepressibly slinky One Boy/One Girl. Its effing blinding guitar line mildly redolent of The Virgins (remember them? You’ll doubtless spontaneously upchuck all that newly consumed cacao, if so) the track serves as a concise four-minute continuation of a theme in that they’ve quite patently so too perfected a louche funk/ soul crossover feel. “And just because now it’s different/ Doesn’t change what it meant” Offer proffers, and he couldn’t be more right for though this is the sound of a fundamental band of my formative years experimenting in directly exoteric and thereby truly different sonic aesthetics, it’s no less stimulating both cerebrally and more pertinently, corporeally than anything off Louden Up Now. Roll on up, ‘cause this one’s a yup yup yup from us!’
‘I can’t confess to having been entirely convinced by Chazwick Bundick’s latest Toro Y Moi full-length Anything In Return, just as I had a couple persisting reservations with his most recent London outing down Village Underground. Dan Snaith was kicking around way back then, though I never then put two and two together as to why he may have hankered so insistently to have his named scrawled down on some guestlist or other. For Snaith’s so-called bit on the side (alongside Daphni, of course) is his Jiaolong imprint, via which Bundick releases bits and pieces under his Les Sins alias. And all the above brings us bang up to today, as Snaith uploads JIAOLONG008 to his Caribou SoundCloud. On the flip is featured Prelims – a minimal wobble that sways between the squelchy and the shinily polished, whilst sounding not too dissimilar to the sort of ragtag laptop experiments Bundick was presumably up to while he should really have been revising.
Though to “quote/ unquote” Hot Chip’s In Our Heads, look at where we are – we’re enthusing over the Chazmeister General from a drizzly London while the American of Filipino descent is quite likely sunning himself down under on the Antipodean leg of his current world tour. He’s doing quite alright for himself, ta very much and Grind is one to loosen up even those most rigorous of daily routine disciples: a conflation of slo-soul samples doused in Auto-Tune and beats to have once sounded spangly and new around the time of Underneath The Pine, it’s Bundick at his most radiant. Indeed, it’s the sound of a summer-long beachside disco party, and one you’re both prematurely, as well as cordially invited to below.’
