Oh shit, Snax on the mix! Matt B on the fat B! Back the fuck up! Here comes motherfucking Erlend, doing that motherfucking thing he does! Fuckingshit C+C electro Power Rangers! Sweet weed with dicks, Øye's making his Ø-face!
No doubt, this album was a blast to record-- a party-and-a-half in a small room with only awesome dudes. If Hello Stranger isn't terra nova, Berlin's old man technogloom DJ Kaos has definitely loosened up a bit since the other things he used to do. Here he's collaborated with old and new buds alike, coming up with this programmatically fun italo punk-funk chi-house post-9/11 distillation of every remotely trendy genre coolly revisited in the last five years. Divatox, this is your worst nightmare.
Copies of copies of copies, whatever-- some of these songs are actually likable. Kaos and dudes know each sound's sweet spot, picking, cutting, and pasting only the most time-tested licks for nine flawless test-tube babies. These songs look human, but they will never know their parents-- especially something like Gattacampy opener "Lessons In Love", which is all breathy electro vox and understated italo swells and lines like "Lessons in love/ Where does it go from here?" Better still is "Now And Forever"-- jangly chromatic rhythm postpunkin, octave bass slaps, cowbell, falsetto chorus, a pisspoor guitar solo, timbales, and-- wait for it-- cowbell.
Written out, the album sounds bloated. But most tracks on Hello Stranger take more than seven minutes to unravel, lending this LP a DJ set vibe. First come the drink-on tracks, then the hard rockers, then Snax to the max, then the early morning too-drunk-to-care-what-the-DJ-plays tracks (these tracks on Hello Stranger are kinda boring), then the DJ runs out of stuff to play and combs for his least shitty B-sides (these tracks on Hello Stranger sorta suck), then, finally, a "last song" track, which, in LCDspeak, erases the whole album so we can spin it again. That track on Hello Stranger sounds erasey.
For the record: Captain Snax got his duefork a few weeks ago here.
Random and overly reductive: I find the similarities among the Out Hud, LCD, and Kaos albums-- same number of tracks (cutting Out Hud's 28-second intro), "last songs," openly referential and genre-based, none of them as dancey as people expected them to be-- somewhat amusing.
Insightful and more important than anything I've said so far: Midway through 80s D-train groove "Juices" is a pretty terrible impression of Louis Armstrong, but to its credit, it's also the first Kirstie-Alley-impersonating-Louis-Armstrong impression in recorded history.
