On their last album, 2006’s 15 Again, the French duo Cassius found themselves faced with a not-uncommon problem for European dance acts in the 21st century. Here they were, in mid-career and on their third album, trapped beneath the overlapping shadows of Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx. The result was a mixed bag of funk and house and funky house, broken up by the occasional grab at pop’s brass ring. Naturally, there was a Pharrell cameo. It was a tough spot to be in for a duo with such an unassailable pedigree. Hubert Blanc-Fracard and Philippe Cerboneschi’s roots run deep in the French dance scene. In the early 1990s, they were architects of MC Solaar’s jazzy boom-bap sound, and their records for Mo Wax under an earlier alias, La Funk Mob, were trip-hoppy highlights of the label’s peak years. Cerboneschi, meanwhile, is a veteran of Motorbass, a pioneering French house duo that helped pave the way for Daft Punk’s filter-disco revolution.
For a while, Cassius remained central to a scene they’d helped mold. The duo’s debut album, 1999, was a smart, stylish amalgam of retro cues—disco loops, hip-hop scratches, moody Chicago house—that, aside from the Gwen McCrae-sampling single “Feeling for You,” made few overtures to pop. Instead, it put all its effort into building a sustained mood, translating the sound of hip Parisian discotheques to the album format. With their next two albums, 2002’s Au Rêve and 2006’s 15 Again, they expanded their horizons, determined to out-pastiche their peers. They managed a few memorable singles and some righteous curveballs—see, for instance, the Tom Zé-interpolating “Telephone Love”—but as they vacillated between impish pop, funk maximalism, and squirrelly electronic B-sides, they lost their footing.
Ibifornia is their first album in a decade, not counting 2010’s back-to-basics The Rawkers EP, for Ed Banger, and it suggests that Cassius still haven’t figured out quite who they want to be. Let it not be said that they are afraid to take risks, beginning with their coterie of collaborators: Beastie Boys’ Mike D, OneRepublic frontman and pop gun-for-hire Ryan Tedder, Parisian house vocalist JAW, Chan Marshall of Cat Power, and, once again, Pharrell. What, as another of Pharrell’s collaborators might put it, a time to be alive.
Sometimes, those risks pay off handsomely. “Action” builds to an extended climax of dubwise Afro-disco, and the lustrous Chan Marshall shines like the glint off thick velvet, impervious to Mike D’s yelps. The song might not need all nine minutes of its running time—nor a feinting fade-out and reprise—but it’s plenty hypnotic, with Laurent Bardainne’s saxophone and Arnold Moueza’s percussion keeping the energy at a rolling boil. On “Go Up,” another dramatic disco number, Pharrell is Pharrell, while Marshall is sadness incarnate, her descending refrain of “Jealousy” slumping like the shoulders of an inconsolable lover. Who knew that Cat Power would sound so terrific singing over house music? Someone needs to construct an entire album of club tracks around her.
But those standouts struggle to hold their own amid the album's more overwrought anthems and straight-up misfires. “Feel Like Me” puts Marshall ahead of an imaginary union of Spiritualized and M83, and it almost works; so does the opulent ballad “Blue Jean Smile,” sung by John Gourley (of indie rockers Portugal. The Man). But even the most immaculate mood-setting can’t save it from its ridiculous chorus: “Your blue jean smile says/Let’s have a child/Peruvian style/We’ll let it run wild.”
And then there’s “Ibifornia,” a tongue-in-cheek paean to tropical house music—abuzz with roaring lions, screeching monkeys, trilling loons—that winks so hard it risks eyelid cramps. (Those incessant loons, a staple of Balearic dance music, are a dead giveaway that the song is nothing if not self-aware.) Narrated by the British voice actor Gary Martin, who spells out the letters of the title in a booming, Barry White-like baritone—“‘I’ is for ‘I love you,’ ‘B’ is for ‘brotherhood,’” etc.—it's gleefully ridiculous, and as it builds, it develops into a potent, throbbing, peak-time tribal-house jam. But it’s so over the top that it’s a little hard to take seriously, and therein lies the problem. Do clubbers whose pulses race to the sound of rat-a-tat 909 hi-hats really want to be distracted by goofy, lovey-dovey voiceovers? Do punters coming up on E really want what amounts to a comedy record? Like the portmanteau title, which joins Ibiza to California under the banner of balmy reverie, it’s torn between two things that really don’t have anything to do with each other. When presented with apples and oranges, instead of sangria they made Four Loko.
In an album that foregrounds voices, one of the best and most surprising cuts is “Ponce,” the record’s instrumental closer. It’s the only song credited to the duo alone, and as simple as it is—just a shuffling, barely-there drumbeat and a moody synth line—its emotional pull is undeniable. In its singular focus, it’s reminiscent of Motorbass, but it also sounds undeniably fresh; in its sound and mood and spirit of reinvention, it faintly recalls Mr. Fingers’ recent “Qwazars.” It’s a reminder that, at their best, Cassius remain among France’s most expressive house producers. It’s a shame that, in chasing palm trees from Hollywood to Vila d’Eivissa, they’ve lost sight of the splendors that lie closer to home.
