Toward the end of Whit Stillman's excellent film The Last Days of Disco, one of the main characters delivers a monologue about how disco will "never die" (it's early 1980). Sure, he says, it may be temporarily forgotten or wrongly remembered by the masses as John Travolta and platform shoes, but the music itself is too great to ever truly perish, there will always be keepers of the flame keeping it real. If Ice-T had delivered a similar speech at the end of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, you might have the manifesto for Dark Party: Electro will never die. And their debut full-length Light Years provides good reason to cheer the genre's longevity, or at least its modern revival.
Dark Party is the duo of industrious producer Eliot Lipp and the lesser-known Leo 123, whose scant credits so far include a production for L.A. underground rapper Subtitle and some previous appearances alongside Lipp. The latter's debut was released by hip-hop instrumentalist Guillermo Scott Herren of Prefuse 73, and for several albums, Lipp applied his own bright gloss to that style. In 2009, though, Lipp dropped Peace Love Weed 3D, a grinning but uneven album that began taking things in a more distinctively electro direction. Maybe part of what the less prolific Leo 123 brings to Dark Party is a more exacting level of quality control, because the duo's long-gestating debut, Light Years, is an unflagging blast, the sort of non-stop electro party that Peace Love pointed toward but didn't entirely deliver.
Old-school electro isn't exactly an unusual angle these days, but Dark Party kick it with more concision than Dâm-Funk's wandering jams and with deeper sound design than, say, Copy's analog monophonia. "Down" has a reedy vocoder hook that evokes Daft Punk circa a couple of helmet upgrades ago. "Tonight" features chicken-scratch guitar and luxurious plush bass. "Tina" even achieves the feel of a live, if keyboard-equipped, band rocking out, with its acoustic drum sounds and its loose fills and guitar strokes. Multiple tracks add chopped-up vocal samples to the mix, from the diva garble of "Status" to "Feets", with its chanting command to "get your feet, get your feet, get your feet up in the air"-- an inversion of the more common hip-hop request (hands) that all but demands headspins and b-boy acrobatics.
Even when they're just having fun with their synthesizers, the results are consistently catchy. The synth glissandos of "Easy" slide up and down octaves in the finest g-funk style. A teasing keyboard trill on "Fifth" resolves into an archly dramatic little melody. Grounding everything is an unshakable foundation of thick 808 kicks and similarly vintage drum machine claps, snares, and clicks. At 50 minutes long, the album manages not to lag until the very last, with the mellow MPC bumps and synth noodling of "Cab Weather" feeling like a nice, relaxing ride home. At which point you'll want to start the party again.
