Does It Offend You, Yeah? - You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into (EMI)
3/5
By: Alex Lee Thomson
After all the fuss, here's the debut album from Daft Punk enthusiasts Does It Offend You, Yeah?, a band that's kept on the good side of the new electronic association, resisting the urge to go completely and totally nu-rave, well - ish anyway, remaining as dirty and rough as we hoped they would do.
Vocally, it's not that stimulating, with outlandish resemblances to LCD Soundsystem. While that's a perceptibly good thing, you can't help but feel that they've compromised on a lot of the key issues of this record. Maybe time was against them, we are after all talking about a band whose lead singer is a mere hired-help, but what's clear is that at the times when they should be pushing themselves more towards the imaginative side of their sound, they've favoured settling for Klaxons-esque.
Moments of joy come from 'Weird Science', favoured by myself not just because I'm addicted to John Hughes films, but because it's the tumbledown musical calamity that the bands' live show would fantastically normally front. When DIOYY? aren't trying to be Klaxons or LCD Soundsystem they're outright brilliant and it's this healthier planned, inventive spark, which warms my gut into excitement for the band and this, in oomph anyway, huge record.
'Epic Last Song' is what it says on the proverbial tin one could argue, undoubtedly the climactic closer that any good album should have, though where most bafflingly just burn out approaching the end, these guys have put their best track last to close in fitting, well, epic standing. It's a simple trick that works accordingly well, leaving your muscles throbbing for more offence - which the rest of the album just doesn't deliver enough, sadly.
I guess albums from bands that have based a career on performing live will never match up to their reputation, and in that you have to ask if fans will be that excited by this, and likewise newcomers. As a handle to motivate people into going out to see the band live, this will do the trick, we'll bet, as for the most part it's scorching rock-based electronic pandemonium - worth the ears of the few grimy rave obsessed kids left, in the line of CSS, Crystal Castles, Klaxons, etc, etc.
Artists in this article: Does It Offend You, Yeah?
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