Luca Venezia (Drop the Lime) will probably hunt me down for this, but whenever I hear his debut album, This Means Forever-- with breakbeats and synth melodies that crash into each other like cruise ships and aircraft carriers-- it reminds me of the mixes made by high school dance squads. In this case, that's a proudly sentimental compliment. Such dancers typically slap together bits of a dozen songs into a five-minute mix. There are no seamless pause-edits to keep the groove; you can actually hear the tape machine stopping and re-recording between each cut, and yet there is an odd pleasure in grooves that work against dancing.
Venezia almost rarely keeps his attention on a beat, sample, or melody for more than a couple of bars-- it's prime listening for the attention-deficient, like lysergic cartoon music that evokes the ghosts of Looney Tunes composers Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott. "Rad Girl Killy" nails that effect with a zigzagging, rubber-band violin, all bludgeoned by crashing "Amen" breaks. Nothing ever seems settled on This Means Forever-- before a sound can dig in its heels, it's slashed apart by a new sonic idea. Bedroom musicians have exploited that premise for years, but Venezia unleashes a genuine trash-punk vibe. He often sings like Fugazi's Guy Picciotto paying his bills as a rollerdisco DJ struggling to coax people onto the dancefloor. The audience response could be the breakbeats that shatter his DJ booth's glass after a thousand hits.
"Wake the dead kids, one at a time!" Venezia belts out on opener "Shaken" over broken-footed beats, before DSP work gags his vocals with an ether-dipped cloth midway through. "Glassy Eyes" thumps a groove barely held by twittering synths, while the stronger "Rocker Party" focuses on a testosterone-poisoned rhythm.
Standouts are the Alec Empire-on-Nickelodeon funk of "Never, Nah", the oxygen-depleted dancefloor strut of "Hushhushdance", and the diced-up serenades of "Dubbio". Most striking is closer "Tivoli Clinic (10.28.00)", a fading Polaroid of a ballad with brass drones that simmer into oblivion-- a prime comedown after all that delirium.
