The first time I heard "Hear My Name", I laughed with sheer glee, hitting repeat on the car CD player over and over again, totally overjoyed. It's a gorgeously perfect disco-fluff diamond, a lighter-than-air swoop through pop history, a mindless scream of ecstacy, and it ended up at number two on my singles ballot last year. Too bad it's the only good song on Nympho, Armand Van Helden's disco-punk move.
If this seems like a step-behind attempt at blatant trend-humping (which it is), it's also not entirely a bad idea; why shouldn't a top house producer be able to do this shit right? But no. Van Helden's idea of disco-punk consists of layering crunching overproduced metal guitar over weak little basslines and dinky cowbells, then hiring someone to gurgle meaningless sexed-up bullshit over the top. Four of Nympho's 13 songs are collaborations with Virgin Killer whose rawked-up Rapture-biting yawp is unbelievably tiresome and obnoxious. On "Come Play with Me", a ridiculously fake-sexy Cr\x8Fme Blush coos about falling in love with a DJ and doesn't even come close to selling ridiculous lines like "He broke my heart in a limousine/ I was tired of the scene." Even "Jenny", Van Helden's second collaboration with "Hear My Name" vocalists Spalding Rockwell, is a sad attempt at rocking out, the singers pathetically failing at getting all gothy and snarley over a turgid metallic bassline. When people are making fun of coked-out NYC hipsters, this is what they're talking about.
When Van Helden comes up with a decent idea, he runs it into the ground hard. The first time he lays a cheesed-out 70s rock vocal sample over chugging house drums, it's mildly sweeping and glamorous. By the fourth time, it's clear that he doesn't have any more tricks to pull out. And by the time we get to the final track of the album, where Tim Holden says a bunch of echoey poetry-slam stuff over a lumbering, ungainly riff for six and a half minutes, it's clear that "Hear My Name" deserved a much better album.
