The middle ground is dangerous territory when it comes to dance music. Simian Mobile Disco have existed there, uneasily, for over five years now. Making things difficult for themselves, SMD try to borrow from both ends of the spectrum without ever fully embracing lowbrow or highbrow, all-grins fun or fearsomely precise grooves. 2007's debut, Attack Decay Sustain Release, is their only album to really tackle the combination head-on, and probably not so coincidentally, it's also still their best. On Attack, SMD brought the underground's attention to detail and bubblegum dance's playfulness to what might have otherwise been churned-out bangers. They remembered the starkest acid tracks and the most cavernous bleep experiments were once played alongside stupid-fresh (or plain dumb-assed) hip-house foolishness.
If you haven't heard a thing SMD's done since Attack, you might think Unpatterns is the work of a completely different act. It's probably the most low-key and dazzle-averse SMD album yet. Gone are the sassy rollerskate-jam vocals and fat-bottomed rhythm tracks, along with any hint of rock-band bombast or hip-hop swagger. If all those sound like things that make life worth living, you may wish to proceed with caution. These 10 tracks build slowly, each crisp element added to the mix with a watchmaker's patience, and at their most energetic they're still pretty laid-back. SMD want part of the pleasure to be hearing that ingenuity in action, how you can build from just a rustle of synthetic snare drum to complex climax, all without going for obvious crowd-pleasing moves. It's not minimalism, at least in sense of your more acetic art-techno types, all scrawny sonics and inhibited groove. It's more like populist forms-- banging jack tracks on "Put Your Hands Together", lush deep house on "Seraphim"-- stripped back to the most essential parts.
When it works, it's thrilling because SMD can provoke an emotional response, make you swoon or tense up or bust in-seat dance moves, with almost nothing, as if trying to one-up all those other producers who need luscious chord changes, rude basslines, over-the-top diva interjections, etc. But while these tracks want your total attention, they're just as often best appreciated as ambient with a lingering taste of club music, something that passes the time pleasantly enough without really sticking. SMD want these subtle shifts in beat and synth to sound momentous, but their desire for nuance sometimes get the better of them, the results crisply rendered but without any visceral hook or ear-engaging compositional oddness, the extras that makes even the most intellectual-minded dance music compulsively replayable. When disconnected bleeps on "Cerulean" finally resolve themselves into an astringent hook, just in time for the gentle beat to drop, it's clearly meant to be a nerve-tingling dancefloor epiphany, even if you're parked on your keester nowhere near a club. But the whole thing's so dainty and fussy that it provokes a shrug rather than a shudder, and it's too beholden to DJ formula to go anywhere surprising, to play with the really out-there kids in art-techno's first-rank.
The lackluster stuff on Unpatterns isn't a chore, the way smarty-pants dance can be when producers mistake restraint or difficult as intrinsically interesting qualities. But it does make you realize that one of SMD's gifts, as a rock band that defected into the dance world, was a fearlessness at incorporating elements (singing, bridges, dynamics) shrugged off by techno aesthetes who too often confuse monotonous with hypnotic. (It's not surprising that your ears will perk up every time a vocal drops in on Unpatterns.) The last few SMD discs have gone either all-pop or all-weird, with wildly different results, quality-wise and otherwise. 2009's Temporary Pleasure erred by making the duo's crass hunger to crossover a little too overt for comfort, stuffing itself with limp performances by ringer guest singers and trying to pass off over-fussed loop music as radio-ready. (You know, just minus the songs.) 2010's Delicacies could almost be heard as a band recoiling from an obvious mistake. The darker, stranger tracks offered few concessions to SMD's original dance-curious rock fanbase, even if the album occasionally tipped into the kind of rote "stripped-down" groove-making that's been everywhere in the last decade.
And that's where they've decided to stay, apparently, even if Unpatterns backs away from the darkness and moves tentatively toward the pleasure principle once again. This album may lack the wonky heights of Delicacies. It also stays far, far away from the cheeseball lows that stunk up Temporary Pleasure, something for which I guess we should be thankful. SMD are still stuck in the middle, and if they've finally happened on a formula that goes down smoothly for the length of a whole album, you may still find yourself missing the slick tricks and rough edges, all that dance-as-rock oomph and crap rapping, that once made them so endearing.
