From music message boards to The Guardian, the term "hipster house" popped up late last year to describe a recent wave of dance music being made by "rock" or otherwise non-dance types. It encompasses acts like Miracles Club, Ital, and their 100% Silk labelmates, as well as like minds from the more established Italians Do It Better and DFA (Matmos member and Pitchfork contributor Drew Daniel rightly traces the approach's roots all the way back to Throbbing Gristle). The common thread is live electronic instrumentation and lo-fi recording as aesthetic choice (surely, these acts could just as easily afford to drop Ableton onto their laptops as buy rhythm boxes). The approach may recall house's 808 roots, but implicit in that troublesome "hipster" is the idea that these rock kids aren't taking dance music seriously or playing by its rules-- that they're treating it with the irony typically ascribed to the 2000s' favorite strawman. All of which makes Brooklyn duo Blondes both an archetypal hipster house act and a rewarding example of the tag's limitations.
Archetypal because the duo of Zach Steinman and Sam Haar improvises on live instruments, records tracks in single takes rather than endlessly re-tooling them in software, and generally approaches making house tracks with an outsider's disregard for convention. The pair met while studying music and studio art at Oberlin College, which also birthed nü-disco producer Morgan Geist, amongst other acts, and they bring both learned musicianship and a collegiate friendliness toward jamming to bear on their self-titled full-length debut.
Their songs begin with an idea or two-- a beat, an effect, a bassline, or synth phrase-- and gradually accrete more layers, steadily drifting toward a sustained climax before fading out piece by piece. It's the meandering feel of a jam locked into a linear structure: tracks that privilege house's hypnotic repetitions over its cathartic patterns of build-and-release. Blondes' formal transparency-- the way you can see each element as its being added-- makes it easy to imagine them playing these songs live, but they handily avoid the lo-fi "live PA" quality that makes some of their putative peers less than suitable for club sound systems and dance floors.
Blondes collects three previously released 12"'s and a pair of new songs, each arranged as oppositional A- and B-sides: "Lover"/"Hater", "Business"/"Pleasure", "Water"/"Wine", and "Gold"/"Amber". These flipsides aren't exactly dub versions of their related tracks, but they are frequently more subdued reflections-- the bright synth arpeggios and displaced voices on the A-sides submerged into deep house bass thump or ambient atmospherics on their reverse.
A second disc of remixes generally pulls the tracks even further towards their polar extremes, with typically mixed results. Optimo's JD Twitch ratchets up the tribal thump of "Lover", while Dungeon Acid remake it as a sweat-dripping subterranean epic at 11 minutes. Andy Stott's "Pleasure" becomes a muffled deep house throb, while Teengirl Fantasy's remix of "Wine" ups the lush synth pads and adds some piano tinkling, and Bicep's remix of "Water" adds a pneumatic jacking beat and echoing diva vocals. Laurel Halo and Rene Hell respectively make "Gold" and "Amber" into gaseous ambient and an elegiac organ variation. At worst, the remixes are fine but superfluous for all but the specialty DJ or completist; the highlights above make at turns interesting, useful, and simply pleasurable revisions.
Early reviews situated Blondes as better headphone listening than dance-floor filler, and while their releases prior to these 12"'s were more downtempo, this also points to the fact that their songs are simply well produced, as pleasurable on a pure sonic level as they are practical. Despite retaining a relaxed, lightly psychedelic feel, Blondes' songs are properly functionalist grooves. They may lack the rise-and-fall amplitude of traditional house, but on what everyone from Philip Sherburne to the Moritz Von Oswald Trio have recognized as electronic music's "horizontal" axis, they succeed admirably. Only one h-word needed.
