DIGITALISM - I Love You Dude

Digitalism face their trial by fire, the second album, which as everyone knows "is always the hardest in an artist's career" (quote). After the excellent debut of "Idealism", the Hamburg duo is called upon to confirm how good they've been so far.

Unfortunately this confirmation comes as more of an exception than the rule. And it's a real shame, because the album opens with a track that delivers the band's expected evolution: dry, austere rhythm, enveloping electronic phrasing, the speaker cone rattling for all it's worth - "Stratosphere", Digitalism are back.

But just as the listener starts settling into the groove they expected, the whole world suddenly collapses: you check the CD for a second, "yeah, it's the usual one" you think, but what just happened? What is this cut-rate copy of Block Party's "Silent Alarm" doing as the second track of "I Love You Dude"? You check if there's a featuring credit, maybe in brackets next to the title: nothing doing, Jens and Ismail have clearly lost their minds. Or, more likely, they tried to jump on the indie-rock bandwagon five years too late: that's why "2 Hearts" sounds so damn dated and commercial. And the attempt to give the bodywork a makeover on "Circles" also fails miserably: the engine stays the same, with just a few garish colors slapped on to make the shell look more electro.

Things probably couldn't have gone much worse, and sure enough "Blitz" brings back the french touch: it doesn't add anything new, but the adrenaline starts flowing again and the foot-and-knee duo gets moving once more: Daft Punk can take the tribute as a compliment (the video for the previous "2 Hearts" was also clearly inspired by "Tron"), and fans breathe a sigh of relief — not a total write-off after all.

But there's no time to shake off the previous two missteps and chalk them up as youthful sins, because "Forrest Gump", after an intro that's actually promising, immediately drags us back to harsh reality: which producer brainwashed Digitalism here? Yet another track with a catchy chorus, the kind you can find a thousand of, using Forrest's run as a sales gimmick: the saccharine vocal only deepens the sense of frustration and anger, the bewilderment that slowly gives way to resignation.

Prodigy wrote "Smack My Bitch Up" back in 1997, but at least "Reeperbahn" steers things back onto the right track: jittery, recursive industrial sounds — hopefully we've finally turned the corner for good. And so it seems; "Antibiotics" arrives to pick up the thread dropped right after the opening track; it keeps us hanging in the first few seconds, then we start riding sine waves of dance-punk phrasing, the landscape below starts to feel familiar again, and before long that idealistic groundwork reaches the heights we'd been hoping for.

"Just Gazin'", a offspring of "Orchestra Of Bubbles" by fellow countrymen Apparat and Ellen Allien, would have fit fine on an album that keeps moving nonstop, like a rest stop at a service station, like crossing a viaduct through the Apennines — but we've covered so few miles on this flat three-lane highway that a reflective, dreamlike moment wasn't exactly called for.

Just as despair sets in, on the second-to-last track comes yet another reversal: "Miami Showdown", the album's gem, opens up entirely new territory in Jens and Ismail's journey. It's an electronic ride that builds in a different way, not content to merely build suspense for the smoke machine or deliver white-hot blasts for the light-jay's sugar-rush crowd: it probes genuinely new paths compared to everything offered up until now.

It closes with a second tribute to the French masters: "Encore" slides by like yet another already-heard track, reassuring us somewhat after the stylistic missteps scattered throughout, without, however, offering much comfort about what lies ahead.

With "I Love You Dude", Digitalism miss the chance to keep developing a sound that, even if dedicated to the dancefloor, was adding its own small piece to the immense contribution Germany has made to electronic music since the days of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream.

Unfortunately there's very little dance-punk here: the duo left their heart behind in favor of a more calculated, accessibility-driven approach.

And as always happens when faced with an operation of this kind, it's only natural to wonder why: was it really worth it, and will all this at least prove useful for a leap forward in sales?

In our view, no.

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30/09/2011