Blitz Gazer

Album review

The band name DAT Politics; an album titled Blitz Gazer; the Sub Rosa label. All of these might lead a reasonable person to expect a certain brand of forbidding experimentalism, perhaps of a grimly Teutonic nature. In fact, what the quartet led by Claude Datgirl and Gaëtan C. Collett (aka Tone Rec and Skipp) deliver on their first album for Sub Rosa is a pretty straightforward party record, and an effortlessly enjoyable one. That's not to say that it isn't quirky: on the contrary, the group's embrace of early-'80s electro-pop conventions is unusually explicit and thorough; the electronic handclaps and vocoder on "People R Inside," the octave-jumping bassline and heavenly choir ecstasy of "Between Us," the blocky Human League-meets-A Flock of Seagulls synth funk of the instrumental "Corpsicle" -- these are exercises in strangely pure and utterly charming nostalgia. Even when the 21st century does make an appearance, it's thoroughly subjugated to the demands of happy party-time music: "Switch On," for example, is built on a dubsteppy rhythmic pattern, but its bleepy synth lines and shameless tunefulness are like a slap in the face to the claustrophobic dystopian groove that is dubstep's usual stock in trade. Song titles like "Sourcloud" and "Face in Sustain" leave one grateful not to be able to decipher most of the lyrics, but the voices themselves (which actually appear on only about half of this album's tracks) are consistently enjoyable to listen to. This is perhaps the most purely fun album to come out on the Sub Rosa label in a decade. Or on any label, for that matter.
© Rick Anderson /TiVo