James Pants plays a trick we-- the listening audience-- are probably becoming more and more familiar with all the time: making you feel like you're hearing a record that was made 25 years ago but simultaneously making it impossible to figure out what that record is. It's VIP-lounge funk, it's video-game grain, it's John Hughes movie balladry put through the wash, it's goofy electro-pop, it conjures visions of the keytar-- it's a variety of styles that no one band would've synthesized in the 1970s and 80s but that end up sloshing together in Pants' fuzzy, one-man-band memory of his own record collection. (And yes, I'll relish in taking the opportunity to call him "Pants" from here on.)
Part of what's interesting about his particular mode of retro is that he often goes after sounds that were unusual or anachronistic to begin with. Songs like "Strange Girl" or "Darlin", for example, remind me of Suicide, a late-70s group that was trying to recapture the simplicity and cool of 50s balladry in its own acidic way. Or "Beta", which, vocals aside, sounds a little like the Fall, an 80s band that made efforts to recapture the thudding and gleeful repetition of late-60s proto-punk and krautrock. At several points, he sounds a lot like now-labelmate Gary Wilson, an experimental R&B singer most famous in the mainstream for being namechecked by Beck on Odelay, but most artistically valuable for his efforts to reconcile long passages of exploratory keyboard dissonance and mouthbreathing vocals with smooth jams.
The memory games are fun, especially with someone who seems to listen to music as lovingly and deeply as Pants. And even if you aren't steeped in weird old records (and don't care about them unless they've been reissued in the past five years), it doesn't matter-- like Ariel Pink, Pants is making the kind of seamless and intensely retro music more representative of the American underground circa 2011 than any particular place and time during the 1980s.
James Pants is his third album, less goofy and party-focused than 2008's Welcome, and a little less brooding and funky than 2009's Seven Seals. He started out as an intern at Stones Throw, the label that not only ended up signing him but more recently put out records by Gary Wilson and guys like Bruce Haack: white mad-scientist types who had an impact on underground black music for their exploration of how bleep-and-bloop could work in the context of music that was related to conventional R&B and funk. Pants follows in that tradition (if you could properly call it a tradition, considering Haack and Wilson's impact seems more accidental than calculated), but he also exists on a vector with guys like Dâm-Funk and Madlib-- artists who not only play in the stylistic cracks of obscure, beat-oriented music, but make records that sound like they're stuck in a past era that, paradoxically, never existed.
