The artwork for Edinburgh-via-London band Django Django's eponymous debut perfectly sums up the record's basic contrast: the clash of the dustbowl against some futuristic, swirling alien presence. Prairie guitars with heavy-thumbed top strings sidestep and shuffle around chirruping synthesizers, sonar-shaky womps, and krautrock plains in a fashion not dissimilar to Beck's more recent releases. However, one of the joys of Django Django is that even though it's rendered in two basic colors-- natural and synthetic-- the scenarios it conjures are significantly more multifaceted.
There's a boyish sense of adventure and emotion to this album. Following a mechanical introduction that sounds like the theme to a 1980s science educational video, "Hail Bop"'s airless, stabby twang recalls a sci-fi terror sequence-- desperately trying to diffuse a ticking time bomb, or escape a compressing trash compactor. The ensuing burbling synths, arid Dick Dale-indebted guitar and unpredictable squelches recall the kind of landscapes conjured by the Super Furry Animals, rolling hills perfect for boisterous psychedelic trips, with the conspicuously blankly chanted lyrics set among hillocks and vast skies, too. A potentially romantic figure "appear[s] from the hillside... a funny look in your eye," before darting off again in spite of the onlooker having been "waiting here so long."
The scene sets the tone for an album where what appears to be a disintegrating relationship is rarely described in human or adult emotional terms; rather it's as a tricksy Rube Goldberg device where the parties race to reassemble and disassemble the partnership as part of a game of emotional one-upmanship and obstacle-planting. Former single "Default" is a wickedly neurotic stompbox-powered chant with voices intermittently gargling and hissing in cuckoo clock rhythm. "We just lit the fire and now you want to put it out," Dave, Vincent, Tommy, and Jimmy chant. "Take one for the team/ You're a cog in the machine/ It's like a default." The itchy "WOR" starts with a murkily obfuscated motif from "Misirlou", rumbling into a rubbery, lurching funk that sets the pace for another competitive move: "I took a chance on you and it's time to ring the bell."
The unrelenting chanted singing style can make Django Django sound a bit sterile and passionless, building to a brassy sheen that defies the eloquent frustration of a song like "Storm": "You are a storm; you are my little storm/ I watch the wind change to find out where you've been blown." The group has been lazily compared to the Beta Band, largely due to their Fife-born drummer and production whizz David Maclean being the younger brother of John Maclean. But whereas that band married Lennon-like vocal calm with bucolic, occasionally piqued backing, Django Django seem more akin to Hot Chip in approach: a bunch of comparative straights going doolally in a studio, using their dispassionate vocal layering as the foundation from which to paint in entertainingly bold strokes. "Firewater", a song about getting legless on booze in the desert, gambols and struts like a drunk precariously skirting the edge of a campfire; "Skies Over Cairo" gets weirder, the sound of a Saharan-influenced Kraftwerk careering over a huffing rhythm seemingly comprised of samples of recorded water. Despite jangling on past its shelf life, the opening of "Zumm Zumm" fizzes and clanks like an ancient fairground attraction, with hyena yaps punctuating oblique exclamations about unexpected, never-before-seen occurrences.
That same sense of vivacity can't be applied to the song that follows it, "Hand of Man", whose dull country roughage creaks out beneath a numbed appropriation of the melody from the Shins' "New Slang". Thankfully, however, Django Django picks up again with "Love's Dart", a bandy coconut canter which urges that goals-- romantic or otherwise-- can be more than just a mirage if you keep them firmly in mind. Django Django are bursting with ideas and an intriguing aesthetic that would suggest that their own goals are very keenly defined-- the result of working on this album for over two years, perhaps-- with the artwork's simplicity acting as a red herring to their boundlessly imaginative, considered complexity.
