When it comes to fucking around, Duck Sauce are not fucking around. Armand Van Helden and A-Trak have spent a large part of this decade acting as big-box dance music's merry pranksters, following their clown-nosed muses to the most illogically comical endpoints. In their music videos, the duo have acted as whistle-prone barbers, drank each other's milkshakes, and become literal dickheads; after bringing their bomber jacket-befitted inflatable mascot to New York City's Governor's Ball festival in 2012, they set their creation floating down the East River during the following year's installment of the festival—just for laughs.
While introducing Duck Sauce's loopy entry in BBC's Essential Mix series, Armand Van Helden described the originals-heavy portion of the two-hour mix as "songs we tried shopping to George Michael, Celine Dion, Billy Joel, and were all declined"; loaded with stoner-friendly sampledelia, the end result resembled something the Avalanches would've whipped up if they binged on breakfast burritos and after-hours basic cable.
"There’s nothing serious about Duck Sauce—nothing," said A-Trak (real name Alain Macklovitch) when I interviewed him and Van Helden earlier this year. The project has indeed come across as a lackadaisical concern for the two veteran producers, releasing roughly a single a year over the past six years and devoting the rest of their shared effort to crowd-pleasing live performances on the festival circuit. The pair liken their biggest hit to date, the giddily repetitive "Barbra Streisand", to the Champs' "Tequila Song"—"Just a riff and a word"—and to this point Duck Sauce have come across as a novelty concern, a singles project that excels at penetrating the zeitgeist.
Which is fine; dance music thrives as a singles-focused culture, and even with the current micro-boom in artist-focused albums as a byproduct of the EDM money pit, smart money was not on the guys with the inflatable duck releasing a satisfying full-length. So the punchline to Duck Sauce's greatest prank yet is that they've gone ahead and done exactly that. Quack, Duck Sauce's proper debut, is reverential to the music of A-Trak and Van Helden's past—disco's ecstatic glide, house music's hedonistic heartbeat, the good-natured irreverence of classic hip-hop—while sounding totally refreshing amongst its contemporaries. The closest thing here to what some would refer to as "EDM" is the squeaky Dutch house of "It's You", which rests its central melody on, of all things, a sped-up sample of a goddamn doo-wop song.
If Daft Punk's Random Access Memories found the robots paying tribute to the music that shaped their lives, then Quack is Duck Sauce paying tribute to Daft Punk themselves, along with other French Touch luminaries like Alan Braxe, Fred Falke, and Etienne de Crécy. A-Trak and Van Helden liberally apply the glowing synths and filter-heavy textures of those Gallic auteurs throughout Quack, the entire thing brushed with the type of stupid-smart goofiness not seen since Fatboy Slim's big-beat heyday. Bemoan festival-ready dance music as you wish, but the genre's greatest malady in 2014 is that many of its practitioners sound like they're trying too hard to have fun; Duck Sauce bring the party without breaking a sweat.
Expertly playing to its creators' strengths—Van Helden's ability to hardwire hip-hop breaks and house motifs, A-Trak's turntablist skill and crate-digging know-how—Quack operates at one intense speed and never lets up, from the heavy thump that kicks open "Chariots of the Gods" to "Time Waits for No-One"'s stadium-minded '80s rock fixations. Subtlety is non-existent. The secret to Quack's success, then, is how loud it isn't: the record is mastered with finesse, an impressive studio sheen that wraps even the most hard-hitting of A-Trak and Van Helden's creations in a down comforter. Disco-pop auteurs Chromeo pitch in on various tasks throughout the album—vocalist Dave Macklovitch, brother of Alain, sings lead on "Everyone" under the goofball alias Teddy Toothpick—and Quack frequently bears the type of big-money studio wizardry that the perpetually underestimated Chromeo are known for.
At 54 minutes long, Quack isn't completely user-friendly as a front-to-back listening experience (shave two minutes off of every song and you'd have a tighter album that nonetheless would lose its functionality as a collection of DJ tools) but A-Trak and Van Helden deploy a few tricks to avoid inducing listener fatigue. Once or twice, they veer close to repetition for repetition's sake—the vocal drops and cyclical strings of "Charlie Chazz & Rappin Ralph" wear out their welcome halfway into the tune's five-minute length—but elsewhere they exhibit an impressive sense of patience. Leaning hard on samples from THP Orchestra's "Good to Me", the hook on "Goody Two Shoes" is almost impossibly indulgent to the point where it risks inducing diabetic shock; Duck Sauce know this, tempering the song's initial burst with a placid midsection of hand drums and lazer synths before bringing back the chorus in a way that triggers an intoxicating release. Even "Barbra Streisand", placed in the midst of Quack's world-beating final third, ebbs and flows with added flourishes (check the steel drum-sounding tones less than a minute in) to avoid reaching peak monotonousness.
The other ace up Quack's sleeve is its skits. I know, I know—skits on albums are rarely funny, and their success more often than not relies on the listener's sense of humor, and everyone's definition of what's "funny" is as specific as snowflake architecture. Regardless, A-Trak and Van Helden, along with a cast of wiseguys that range from viral comedian the Fat Jew to Lord Sear from radio DJs Stretch & Bobbito's classic NYC hip-hop show, are pretty good at busting your gut, providing that your gut has a high tolerance for quacking noises and jokes about smelly underwear. They send up comparison-obsessed music nerds ("It’s sort of Mel Gibson meets ancient aliens"), Spanish-language radio shows, and Wu-Tang Clan's classic torture skit from "Method Man", the latter in which a pitched-down A-Trak and Van Helden promise to "Take you to a yoga ashram and shit, in fuckin’ Toronto."
A few skits on Quack (the Fat Jew's prank phone call to a Chinese restaurant at the end of "Ring Me", the club-and-concert-calendar radio-promo spoof tacked on to "NRG") will undoubtedly trigger nostalgic reactions from anyone who's spent the majority of their lives in the tri-state area that surrounds New York City, and that's the point. A-Trak and Van Helden are both NYC denizens—the latter's legacy is practically cemented as one of many who shaped and added vibrancy to the city's dance culture—and even if they don't quite hit the heights of the A-Trak-name-checked influence of Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique (how could they, let alone anyone?), they've created a hedonistic, piston-pumping album that bears as much relation to the urban hustle-and-bustle as it does to festival crowds' surging, ecstatic mindsets, a love letter to NYC that sounds good just about anywhere you're likely to hear it.
