Diplo contains multitudes. Up until now, there's really only been one thing uniting all of Wesley Pentz's various production credits: It's all been shit designed for dancing. (Even Florida, Diplo's own downtempo Endtroducing-esque affair, had some dancefloor push to it.) But that's not the case with the man's latest project. Math addled British hardcore kids Rolo Tomassi make a hell of a racket, but it's not the kind of racket that really encourages anyone to bust any kind of move, not even the punch-punch-spinkick variety you see at hardcore shows. (There's breakdancing in the band's "Party Wounds" video, but it's pretty incongruous, and I'm going to go way out on a limb and say their shows do not turn into Rock Steady Crew affairs.)
There's really nothing about Cosmology, the band's Diplo-produced album, that sounds like a Diplo production. Instead, it sounds like hardcore-- juddering stop-start hardcore with queasy keyboard lines and occasional pushes toward prettiness, but hardcore nonetheless. The synths don't sound like Diplo synths, and there's zero baile funk influence to be heard. Everything is well-recorded, with the vocals way up front, which is sort of a problem; music like this tends to work better when the tracks come with some mysterious murk. But I'm guessing Diplo had something to do with the way the album flows together-- no gaps between songs, everything moving together in a seamless suite. It works pretty well for this band.
If there's one personality that dominates the LP, though, it's not Wes Pentz. It's frontwoman Eva Spence, who's equally comfortable singing in a glassy, ethereal coo and a glasses-shattering screech. Spence's two singing styles are so different, in fact, that I just assumed she was two different people when I first heard the album, and I got annoyed that the band didn't let the girl sing more often. When she's in shriek mode, you totally can't tell that's a girl singing. There's also not much difference between that scream and every other scream from every other screamy hardcore band over the past 10 years. That scream can be an effective tool when she uses it at big moments, but when it's just that most of the time-- as it is here-- it loses impact. When she's actually singing, though, she doesn't sound much like anyone else.
Spence only uses that calm, frozen vocal style when the band stretches out and lets their tracks breathe. The first six or so tracks on the album are all clangy, off-kilter riff-tantrums, and we rarely get to hear that voice. These tracks are all mathed-out fragmentation, like the Dillinger Escape Plan or the Blood Brothers, except without the fireball urgency those bands could bring. Instead, the frantic time-sig switch-ups feel like showing off, sometimes with disconcerting levels of Zappa/Bungle-esque self-conscious weirdness.
It's on the back half of the album, where the band stretches out on longer songs with more ideas, that they really come to life. On these tracks, they relax their pyrotechnics enough to find some melody in their discord. The closing title track is the best song on the album by a mile. It builds from eerie, vaguely Angelo Badalamenti keyboards toward something much heavier, leaning more toward prog than hardcore for most of the track's eight minutes. This song reminds me of the better tracks on Genghis Tron's recent Board Up the House: A frenzied, fractal band finding its voice by zoning out. More of that, please.
