Back when indie rock and dance music seemed an unholy matrimony, skeptics could be comforted by No Wave comps and the concurrent uptick in krautrock awareness. Every divisive Out Hud or Radio 4 release felt kosher if uploaded onto the same iPod playlist with at least one obscure cut from, say, Liquid Liquid or DNA. Even when enough mind-blowing dance-punk releases finally elevated the genre above fad status, these stubborn, joyless touchstones occupied a big part of listeners' consciences. San Francisco instrumental quartet Tussle are apparently among the few who haven't received the memo that there's big bucks in semi-artistically fusing dance and rock music together. They cling to their influences on a purely cerebral level, making no effort to coddle listeners not already immersed in the genre.
Tussle's first two LPs cast the group more as connoisseurs than revivalists, but Cream Cuts, as its name tantalizingly suggests, seeks to derive at least some degree of pleasure from the band's otherwise sterile precision. Tracks like the bubbly "Night of the Hunter" tap into the NES-informed instrumental rock of the Octopus Project or Hella's Chirpin' Hard, and are aided by the playfulness of percussionist Jonathan Holland, who's willing to clang together anything he finds in the junkyard. Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor even makes a cameo, spreading his pop wealth over "Titan", by far the brightest and loosest song here.
This healthy dose of accessibility also spills over into the spacebound portions of the album. "Transparent C" pays homage to expansive trailblazers Cluster and Kraftwerk, while the group's dub and Manchester leanings resurface on the song's Happy Mondays-style outro. "Rainbow Claw", the crème de la Cream Cuts, reaches the most effective compromise between Tussle's right and left brain. Updating the intergalactic siren from ESG's "UFO", "Claw" batters its austere bassline with legions of synths, causing the Martian groove to occasionally fly off-course into a wonderful B-section freakout that's at once carefree and meticulous.
Of course, this newfound immediacy is all relative. Throughout the album, Tussle continually ride up to the line of release, but then pull back, like when they short circuit "Meh-Teh"'s potentially huge pay-off with a wonky noise collage tangent. Even more confounding, they plop aimless interludes like "Third Party" and "Personal Effects" between album highlights, which begs the question of how big a scope Tussle's aiming for. The band's superhuman patience and dirty minimalism seem fit for longer, more sprawling works. Instead, they're stuck in limbo between catchiness and craftsmanship.
