The Proper Sex is the debut full-length from I.U.D., a duo of Lizzi Bougatsos of Gang Gang Dance and Sadie Laska from Growing. It's a purposefully messy and undirected record that sounds like early Boredoms and industrial music. I have tried listening to it sitting down, standing up, on the bus, in my room, fixing soup, just before bed, and just after my morning coffee, and I don't like it very much. I will humbly try and explain why.
Growing is a drum-less project that, at best, makes rippling, druggy, and exquisitely loud drone music. Gang Gang Dance is, like Animal Collective, a hip, urbane band trying to integrate non-Western dance rhythms into experimental pop. Both are self-consciously progressive but take comfort in the past-- Growing in early ambient music and the sublime patterns of 1970s composition, and Gang Gang Dance in post-punk and no wave's tribal outliers.
I.U.D. is a side project that will be marketed based on its members (even in this review's homepage blurb), but it doesn't share a lot of common ground with either Gang Gang Dance or Growing. As a listener and writer, this is a simple but frustrating position to be in. Just because I own leather boots does not mean I want a hamburger. But if I give the hamburger a try and don't like it, my waiter will remind me that I ordered a hamburger not leather boots. Admittedly, that's not the cow's fault.
And yet there's a latent, dangerous fascination to stuff like side projects and stylistic departures-- Lil Wayne's terrible, post–Axe body spray rock music is interesting because it was made by Lil Wayne and not by a contractor who downgraded to day-old bread at Food Lion for a year to be able to afford Pro Tools. This is the sad, populous border at which audiences forsake the experience of music to psychologize and contextualize.
If I'm listening to I.U.D. fairly, they sound like a band with goals: music that feels animalistic but self-aware, chaotic but controlled. Most of the songs are built from layered shrieks, thuds, and samples. No real melodies, few discernible lyrics. The best tracks on The Proper Sex sound great on headphones-- the dense, spirited bricks of "Glo Balls" or "911", for example, where drums and voices tumble across the sound field, demanding attention for an instant before being wrestled aside. These are moments of violence and vitality. These are moments where I don't even register that I'm listening to I.U.D., let alone a Gang Gang Dance/Growing side project-- a full-on nightmare state that fellow New Yorkers Excepter and Black Dice have been chasing for nearly a decade.
But most of The Proper Sex is conducted with the compassion of a bank transaction: distracted, a little inert, a little perfunctory. I know, I should be taking I.U.D. at face value. Maybe the loping "Girls Just Wanna (Time to Have Sex)" and "Monk Hummer"-- 11 and 8 minutes, respectively-- are supposed to lack... climax. In that case, it's blasé, threat-less industrial music, a concept with no more internal logic than skydiving from 20 feet. Ultimately, The Proper Sex sounds like a lark: harmless and a little ignorable for everyone involved; perfectly irrelevant; gravy-- in a way, just what you'd expect from a side project.
