Darwin Deez Darwin Deez (Lucky Number)
3/5
By: Alex Lee Thomson
This quirky debut comes out as other American bedroom-based artist Owl City soars at number one across the globe; proof if ever it was needed that there’s many a thing for a strange looking young lad to do in their sanctuary besides flick through a soggy copy of Vogue. There is an Owl City feel to this, plastered with and held together by the same wiry laptop beats, meaning there’s little warmth to most of it, but what Deez does have on this short headache of noise, certainly as it gets a few tracks in, is more than one or two ideas. That’s where Owl City sort of fell apart, hey.
Darwin Deez is certainly, sonically anyway, an elder cousin to modern bedroom production. He’s cool, involved and unusual. His first full length is a labour of love and dedication. It’s a coat of notes and bits of songs, tousled together and served up like a barrelful of pop shrapnel. It’s angular 90’s, not as flamboyant as Yeasayer or hardcore as Cymbals Eat Guitars and Royal Bangs, but that’s the direction most of the material flows. Imagery-ridden songs about everything and yet nothing much at all, the anonymity and curiosities of being a twenty-something New Yorker, the material orbits around the importance / insignificance of our protagonist.
The mathematically low-fi approach to this is awesome, and could call to mind some of Beck’s more knob-twiddling works, which when saddled atop the majority of these songs clean, fidgety melodies is definitely cause for applause. It’s modest but full of glitz in that sense, which is enjoyably confusing, and as the album gingerly steps along you find more of those tiny incidents that cause double-take. Moments where he dreamily sings of one thing while projecting an image of another through fragments of secular pop. For the most part Darwin makes a great sound, but performs it too calmly to really grab you. You kind of want him to reach out of your stereo and grab your bollocks, which he just doesn’t do. Still though, this is wonderful background noise.
Artists in this article: Darwin Deez
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