reviews / 2010

CHANDELIERS - Dirty Moves

Name: CHANDELIERS – Dirty Moves
Item: Dirty Moves
Rating: 6
Author: Francesco Nunziata

2010 (Pickled egg records)

weird disco-rock

by Francesco Nunziata

Hailing from Chicago, the Chandeliers deliver their offbeat idea of weird disco-rock on “Dirty Moves”.

An album that is tasty and never predictable, though it is often self-indulgent and out of focus. Still, there is so much stuff mixed into these tracks that, whatever you think of it, one listen is well worth it. In barely forty minutes we go from the tribal, lopsided electro-rock of “Analog Cabin” to the bloated Excepter of “3rd World”, from the spastic dance music of “Rubber Room” to the pocket-sized tropicalism of “Dragon Contest”, from the new-age bubbles of “Telekinesis” to the android funk of “Pharoah’s Fury” and “Ravecrunk”.

A small, glorious pot-pourri of musical leftovers that is enjoyable to listen to, like savoring an exotic dish full of mysterious ingredients and rich in colour (much like the psychedelic cover, in fact). Alongside the actual tracks (if we can call them that!), there is a series of little bridges, also instrumental, that swallow vintage electronics, analogue/digital debris, degraded orchestrations, miniaturised techno anthems, galactic interrogations, crumbling hypotheses of world music, lo-fi psychedelia and computer music teleported back in time.

Chris Kalis, Dan Jugle, Harry Brenner and Scott McGaughey belong to that breed of musicians forever curious to experiment with new (con)fusions of style and sound. They succeed only in part, because their work still comes across as too scattered. Meanwhile, something like the pre-jazz-turn, freeze-dried Spring Heel Jack of “Taste of Cherry” or the afro-tronica of “Yaqona” points the way to a genuinely curious party.

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04/03/2010

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Francesco Nunziata, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition