EL GUAPO - Fake French

The debut of El Guapo, the trio handpicked by Ian MacKaye to give the Dischord label a new flavor, was a rather strange case. Many people couldn't make heads or tails of it, others flagged it as the "rip-off" of the year, while still others read signs of genius in those heterogeneous tracks, a fruitcake of new wave, electronics and indie, studded with candied fruit and citrus peel.

Had they not come back just a year later with a new record, this very "Fake French", time might well have erased them from the memory of those who never loved or understood them; their return to the scene picks up the hot potato again, but this time the Washington trio's output feels less frayed, without being any less intriguing for it. So here we find electronics with an unmistakable '80s aroma, voices chanting call-and-response lines in a detached, demented way, riffs borrowed from indie rock, sequencers lifted from Moroder, little robots and accordions straight out of a Parisian bistro, but all of it more tightly framed into songs that thankfully rarely fall into the verse-chorus trap, more often playing with the interlocking of voices, synths and drums, riding a wave of intelligent minimalism. And the right formula is found across all twelve tracks, each of which has more than one good reason to be remembered and, why not, hummed along to, since the thing that strikes your ears right away is that this record is, on top of everything, fun; the grooves are right on the money, as a small-town DJ might put it, and that's really the plain truth.

Among the standout tracks we can point to the opening "Glass House" with its absurd little choruses, "Justin Destroyer" and its sequencer duetting with Japanese-cartoon voices, and "Underground", which basically rides on a single synth line that sounds like it escaped from some B-movie sci-fi flick but sets off a memorable ping-pong between obsessive choruses and drum machine; on top of that, the lopsided carousel-roll of "I Don't Care" and the waltz of "Hollywood Crew" push the surreal tone of El Guapo's music even further, given their embrace of folk-music elements, highlighted by the well-balanced use of accordion, which in this context comes across as nothing short of defamiliarizing.

If the forefathers of this music seem to be the usual greats Devo and Pere Ubu, but deep down also the surreal, grotesque spirit of Residents, then the older cousins we could call Trans Am and VSS. El Guapo's greatness, though, lies in making us accept, with a big grin, even the suspicion that maybe they're just pulling our leg. For that alone, they deserve to be considered a bunch of twisted geniuses.

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27/10/2006