Anyone who knows my tastes from the "Month in Techno" column will already have me pegged as a booster of the boompty, which is true; anyone who has by now heard My My's refined (and yet bumptious) take on post-minimalist, microsampled dance music-- or if you're feeling lazy, you could just call it "deep house"-- will not be surprised by my enthusiasm for it. But Songs for the Gentle, My My's first album, isn't your average Berlin banger. One of the subtlest and most richly rewarding electronic long-players of the year, it's the kind of album that could, if given the right push, snare at least a portion of the elusive crossover market. Now, My My aren't their labelmate Isolée, and Songs isn't We Are Monster-- it's a great album, but not quite as great as Isolée's unlikely breakout record from 2005. (My My's record also doesn't have quite the same disco quotient as Isolée's, which means they won't get the same automatic boost among Italo- and beardo-infatuated hipsters, but hey: That's the hipsters' loss.)
For a while, it seemed like the Berlin trio didn't really have anything as specific as a style; My My’s first few 12” singles veered from sleekly bombastic rave-ups like "Serpentine" to the toy-piano house of "Swiss on Rye" to the underwater melancholy of "Butterflys & Zebras", a recent track for London's Aus label that could easily be mistaken for a release on sensitive trance labels like Border Community or Connaisseur. This lack of a unified voice makes a kind of sense, though, given that many of My My's tracks are written and produced principally by its individual members (Nick Höppner, who has a couple of tracks on Hamburg's Liebe*Detail label; the former nu-jazzer also known as Hefner, Lee Jones; and Dubplates & Mastering tech Carsten Klemann). The band's list of influences on its MySpace page also goes some way towards clarifying the stylistic drift, encompassing not only obvious touchstones like Herbert and Carl Craig but also Elton John, the Sea and Cake, Dinosaur Jr. and most tellingly, Sir John Peel.
Songs finds the trio easing into its own sound not so much by resolving earlier contradictions but increasingly navigating the spaces between them. Track after track, the album counterposes sounds that at first seem to have no relation to each other, but after a listen or two, couldn't be imagined in another way. Clearly influenced by the sampling techniques of Herbert and Akufen, My My diverge from many of their German peers by forsaking the clean, machine-driven sound of so much current minimalism in favor of more substantive tone bursts and textures. While working consistently with the standard template underpinning so many forms of house (deep, minimal, electro-), they cleverly cloak it with a surprising, at times bewildering, array of sounds. Listening to one of their tracks unroll is a bit like watching a procession of clowns spill out of a Volkswagen, prompting the listener to wonder just how they squeezed so much stuff into a form so compact. Their song-like tracks (or track-like songs?) are at once lumbering and delicate, unwieldy, and pointillistic.
Much of this unsteady feel is due to My My's counterintuitive approach to drum sampling, pulling together hits with drastically different reverbs and room tones-- so, for instance, a medium-sized snare, with its attendant long decay, might rub shoulders with hi-hats so dry they could have been recorded in an anechoic chamber. Instead of sounding awkward, though, the tactic opens up the sonic equivalent of a non-Euclidean space, a shifting field of relative flux.
Where We Are Monster often felt like a deep-tissue massage so fierce it had the potential to alter the placement of house music's very anatomy, Songs offers a more cosmetic approach, dressing up an oft-cloned body in subtly outrageous shades. There are spongy acid bass lines, errant squeals like the FX on a toy spaceship, synthetic flutes, cash register bells; there are glockenspiels, trumpets, demure guitar licks, harps, rampant bleeps, untrimmed cymbals and resonant organs. (Improbably, they all place nicely together, a testament to the band's very fine ears.) Listeners familiar with Jones' Hefner work will be unsurprised at the soulful touch he brings to keyboard melodies and jazzy, augmented harmonies, turning clever assemblages into something far more expressive.
The sense of soul comes, too, from the vocal samples in songs like "Clean Break", "The Secret Life of Pants", and "Got It"-- some of them slowing in mid-syllable like records being hand-braked. Oddly, there are far fewer vocals than you'd think; on a song like "Eleventh Hour" a single, distant coo is enough to lend the whole track the illusion of human presence. Or maybe it's the sense of breath that gives the record the illusion of humanity: Chords heave like a screen door swinging shut, and bleating horn sounds open and close like a bellows. But it's precisely these moments of inspired, imaginative, and occasionally counterintuitive sound design that makes Songs such a thrilling listen-- and makes My My's gentle hand so unexpectedly commanding.
