Popular opinion of Chromeo is understandably divided. You'll hear every kind of appraisal of their synth-soaked music: "too hipster," "too coked-out," "too ironic," even "too fratty." On the contrary, they're mostly just big nerds, gobbling old-school records with aplomb. Hell, band member and hip-hop devotee Dave 1's day job is in academia, teaching French to Columbia undergrads. The duo, originating from Montreal, obsessively charts a constellation of synthesizer-fueled funk and dance-pop out of the 1980s, with old-school hip-hop serving as a guiding compass. Sure, they aren't especially innovative, and their associations with Vice Records and Brooklyn might falsely indicate that their 80s night hokum is all a big put-on.
Chromeo's entry into !K7's DJ-Kicks, the 30th in the storied mixtape series, seems acutely aware of the distinction. Filled with early-80s funk and R&B-infused pop (including bygone classics like Cheri's "Murphy's Law" and Val Young's Rick James produced "Seduction"), the disc serves as a legend for Dave 1 and bandmate P-Thugg's musical evolution. At the same time, it captures the nexus in funk, pop, and synthesizer-based music that coalesced in the early 1980s around the time of Thriller. Michael Jackson, unsurprisingly, doesn't make an appearance on the disc, but his 80s work acts like a set of parentheses around the record, contextualizing the late-70s blue-eyed disco of Leo Sayer with the late-term vocoder stylings of quirky Quebecers Soupir. Oh, and in keeping with DJ-Kicks tradition, Chromeo cover the Eagles.
Like Hot Chip's recent, superior entry in the series, Dave 1 and P-Thugg craft the mix as a personal biography. But where Hot Chip seamlessly weave incongruity into a glittering tapestry of affectations, Chromeo downplay the pillow-talk wit that marks their original works. Any indication of cheeky sexuality demonstrated in "Tenderoni" or "Bonafied Lovin'" is rolled back to the come-hitherisms laid bare in the freshly post-Sexual Revolution 70s. As a result, DJ-Kicks almost academically picks apart enlightening standouts from the era of the duo's pop awakening, but unlike the group's best work, the mix tongue-ties the group's collegial motor-mouth.
The best indication of the boys' amateurish charm is unfortunately found in how they've mixed their picks: Let's just say Chromeo aren't gonna win any professional DJ awards. You could thus take the skeptic's route and argue that the disc only reinforces the duo's ineffectual irony: an awkwardly paced set of also-rans from the rough-and-tumble end of the disco era. However, these "also-rans" reflect a poorly marked through-way in the development of modern pop music, re-affirming Chromeo as quirky but devoted pathfinders. The only thing that seems clear is that you can't separate Chromeo from their early-80s record bins, so you pretty much gotta take it or leave it.
