Metronomy
Nights Out

Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Foals, Hadouken!, Klaxons, Late of The Pier, MGMT, Rapture, These New Puritans...

If these names that I just listed:

a) make you furious, stop reading. In the lines that follow, you'll hardly find anything that will change your mind.

b) make you annoyed: keep reading. Maybe this time you’ll change your mind.

c) make you feel nothing: keep reading. It doesn’t hurt to explore new experiences.

d) turn you on: stop reading. Rush to your snazzy trusted vendor and buy this record without hesitation.

New Rave, Electroclash, Indietronic...various silly nicknames to define that music that is nothing but a car crash at a dangerous intersection between indie rock, electronic, and another genre of choice (at the artist's discretion). Let it be clear: sometimes (very often, actually) these crashes of scrap metal and sheet metal result in horrendous spectacles and someone gets really hurt. Or, quite rarely, one of these disasters turns out to be a fantastically avant-garde, sexy, and gruesome sculpture.

These Metronomy, for example, are just any posers: they come from England, abuse falsetto, abuse vintage keyboards, abuse vintage drum-machines, and have previously released a debut album that only their relatives listened to. Probably only for these characteristics, NME gave them top marks. But let’s move on. 

The first time I listened to this "Nights Out" (the cover of which - three freaks watching the sunset leaning on a hybrid Toyota Prius - didn't bode well) I exclaimed something like a groan, a "bwawwaawmamsmamwmwamamwmssamssmsgàààààààààààà", something that meant like "Wow, this sounds nEw. Even if maybe it isn't at all, it sounds obscenely nEw!". Imagine ants on a beach, imagine they are having a rave with a mega sound system (proportional to the size of an ant), well, now imagine listening to this miniature rave from the height of your own humanity: you'll have a distant idea of how this album sounds.

It's an album where there really is everything. It starts with a crooked, drunken fanfare that vaguely recalls the sickly "Polkamatic" by Vitalic, then slips right into the middle of the party with "The End Of You Too" that revives '70s pomp processed with bagpipes and synthetic flugelhorns in an orgiastic and childish triumph from a treehouse decorated with purple lights and strobes; you then land at the first major single that exhausts your calves: "Radio Ladio", a bored voice over a chaotic 'who knows when' synth, nonsensical handclaps, a funeral march where everyone laughs, high on ecstasy, a bloody easy-listening mess. Yup. What can be said of "My Heart Rate Rapid"? A chorus of silly voices wrapping around a bouncy bass and a dominant synth while our hearts pound fast. And then the forehead bump of "Heartbreaker": a soul-electro-disco-Moroderian ballad that uses the creak of a door (!) as a rhythmic base. All this great stuff and we’re only halfway through the album.

The other half becomes vaguely more reflective but always in the name of off-key, drunken electropop, that pisses on its own feet, that stains its shirt with a drawn-on tuxedo with vomit. Just listen to "Holiday" whose voices strongly remind of the, now indispensable, TV On The Radio. But then, sbadambumbabubum! Another "floorfilla" track sneaks in, bringing all the gelled bangs back to the dance floor, and dear colored plastic glasses à la Kanye West crack under the slow-motion slamdance of "A Thing For Me". And finally the outro: a nice out-of-tune guitar that brings everyone home, everyone embraced, all closely together otherwise we fall, tired, cool, and happy, with rock-hard enthusiasm.

So, this is an album whose keyword is "ramshackle", but also "kitsch", perhaps even "stupid", even a bit "f**kyou90s", and, if you want, also a little "frivolous" no less than many others. But I give it a 5. Fi-ve! Yes, because, all in all (compared to many other crappy records by the aforementioned types), it’s a well-built album, which you can listen to from beginning to end, that blows your mind each time like the first. I rate it 5 because: while you’re debating that these sounds were already reached by the Talking Heads or some other unknown new wave group years before, I'll be with my foolish smile shaking my brain to the rhythm of one of the best albums of this sick non-genre, so trapped in its "here-and-now" spirit, which is the new rave, and I'll emit a senseless gurgle expressing pure ecstatic enjoyment. Starting from....

...now:

GaGggaaaaaAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaFfafsccssaaaaahshasahagaaaaaaaaaaaasgsshSaasssssassggdgaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAsaaassaaaaa... (continues)