Had my shit been more together, I'd have written about Cansei de Ser Sexy's debut in our recent Sub Pop staff feature. To my ears, CSS was a NSFW Blondie, with Lovefoxxx and Adriano Cintra pulling their flamboyant aesthetic equally from the realms of disco and punk, as if "Atomic" were the exemplar of all music and its refrain of "your hair is beautiful" the highest compliment one could be paid. Though Cintra wrote all the music, Lovefoxxx was the heart and soul of the group; that rare lead singer able to easily slip between emotional extremes. At her best she was empathetic and jubilant, but she could turn misanthropic and snarky with equal vigor, aiming her venom at Art Bitches and Paris Hilton after preemptively guarding against a return blow on the opening track, "CSS Suxxx".
Donkey, to put it lightly, brings a different type of energy; Lovefoxxx's presence is still strong, but Cintra's production and songwriting takes the music in a distinctly different direction. In a recent interview with Pitchfork's Paul Thompson, Lovefoxxx described Donkey as not only produced on the road (on their year-long, worldwide tour), but also for the road. Through playing live over their extensive world tour, she explained, they gradually smoothed the sharp extremes of the debut's ecstatic disco and garish electro, and Donkey was built from the idea that its songs would be much easier to recreate live. As a result, most of CSS' nuance, sense of irony, and genre schizophrenia have been excised in favor of, well, the exact sort of bland dance-punk they so skillfully avoided on their first album.
Debut single "Rat Is Dead" hinted at this shift; stylistically, its closest cousin from CSS is "Off the Hook", the most traditional track on a record that defined itself through the jaggy peaks of dissimilar dance styles. "Rat" is of course much darker-- the band's own "Goodbye Earl", more or less-- and like "Hook" it would be fine as the sole bearer of its tone. As it stands, though, "Rat" is the lone bright spot on Donkey's surprisingly bad first half, which aside from the lightweight and forgettable "Reggae All Night", scarcely rises from a gloomy modern rock swamp. Despite hat tips to "Ab Fab" and John Waters, opener "Jager Yoga" isn't glitzy and grotesque but clunky, like "Take Me Out" reimagined for a hipster step-aerobics class. Considering that no other Donkey track deigns to reference pop culture, "Yoga" plays like a vague memory of CSS, with much of the rest a depressing capitulation to a newfound mediocrity.
Appropriately for a record made in airports, hotels, and buses, travel (and what gets lost between destinations) is Donkey's most prominent lyrical conceit, but more often than not it leads the band astray. Cintra-penned "I Fly" is glossy riff-rock that metaphorically represents a touring musician as, you guessed it, a buzzing fly, and "Give Up" is ultra-orthodox love-on-the-road stuff that's not flattered by its Editors-esque backing track. "Left Behind" finds Lovefoxxx singing Cintra's lyrics over dirty laser synths, lamenting a cheating beau in Helsinki and contemplating flying back there to burn her shit and go on a table-dancing bender. These are all competent enough songs to suggest the work of a set of session musicians, but predictability is far from CSS' strong suit. More depressingly, these moments sound like a band that made its name by sniping from afar at the rich and well-traveled more or less becoming part of music's world-conquering, festival-hopping jet-set.
Donkey's highpoints happen when Lovefoxxx's personality shines through clearest: "Beautiful Song" is her take on touring, and the tune is predictably sweet and joyful: it's "Flying high on the rug, with the ones you love," breaking beds instead of sleeping on them, taking goofy photos of your friends. "Believe/Achieve" and "Air Painter" capture her most endearing creative trait: merging romance with an abiding, and equally profound, love for music and art, so wonderfully rendered on CSS via "Music Is My Hot Hot Sex" and "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above". Here, atop "Achieve"s breezy new wave, Lovefoxxx wants to literally and figuratively explore the tastes of her lover, singing "I'm going to eat all your food/ To try to feel what is that/ That music brings to you." "Air Painter" is a romantic lament that glosses as a love letter/CD combo slipped into a suitcase: "Send me a postcard, write me a letter/ And sing this song as loud as can be!"
The joycore bricolage of CSS is all but missing on Donkey, but hopefully the band hasn't allowed itself to become completely jaded by increased celebrity and the rigors of globe-trotting. We're only young once, and it's too much to ask of any artist to maintain the same wide-eyed sense of abandon that made us fall for them in the first place. The road weariness that led to Donkey's by-the-books professionalism seems to have set in so quickly, though; here's hoping it wears off just as fast.
