DASI – Watching You Fall
The modern empires of the world have the very best museums. No, it’s not like everything that’s in it was actually made on the premises. Contrary to what the tour guide might have made you believe, the greatest painters and sculptors didn’t all just move to New York City and leave their best work there. No, the museums stole them. Or, if they were forced to be generous, they wrote out a check.
Similarly, the most important bands tend to have “New York,” “London,” or “Berlin” drawn across their bios. But few of these artists are from these places, and few of the sounds that they created belong to these cities. The centre of empires just collects what is best and is always on the lookout for something surprising. That is precisely why DASI is one of the more exciting new groups from the U.S. cultural capital.
There’s something about DASI’s “Watching You Fall” that suggests the band’s members know very well what kind of music has put NYC on the map, but that they purposely pick and choose what they like and replace everything else. The gently psychedelic atmosphere is fantastic, and the hint of Indian percussion and vocal stylings helps this to stand out. The right sound in the right place, as it turns out, is nothing like what you’d expect.
River Access – Flashbang Showdown
The amount of time that your favourite band or musical artist actually spent on their most famous songs is the stuff of myth and, often, fabricated legends. The information comes through us from recording engineers keen to let us know that the singer might’ve been calling their wife when the title just popped into their head, or that the lyricist somehow misunderstood what the pizza deliveryman had told them.
If you follow that thread, then the vast majority of nuggets of philosophical wisdom ever captured on a record are, in fact, just rockstars trying to make the best of a deadline. Dylan told Leonard Cohen that, unlike him, he wrote his songs in minutes, and Kurt Cobain and Noel Gallagher proudly announced that they got to the lyrics at the very end, making sure that “supersonic” did, indeed, rhyme with “gin and tonic.” I’d like to think that members of River Access look at what constitutes a full day of work for some and laugh their heads off.
However, if I get my way, I’ll have rockstars locked up in rooms for days on end with no way to reach and distract them. They’d be like the blind people in that Saramago novel. They’d have to play the same chorus part 1000 times before they’d even be allowed water. Luckily, this sounds like what River Access did to themselves on the single “Flashbang Showdown.” On a song that recalls Radiohead in their post-Kid A era, the musicians don’t just explore their own worn-out through lyrical themes, but create a dense, minutely detailed, proggy indie rock that makes you think that they would simply allow themselves no escape until they found just the right musical combinations. That’s the kind of attitude I’d be looking for in my dictatorship!
