Singles

Datarock - Give It Up

Martin Goodhead 08/06/2009

Rating: 2.5/5

This is near-great work-out sounds. Listen and you too be could be self-quotedly 'cool as fuck' at the local david lloyd, wearing a red tracksuit and shades over a faintly dewy brow just like Datarock. Personally I like to work my costals to beat-combos with names like 'pig molester fist' or ' trendy face-grind defenestrator', but I suppose such gives more scientific bpm readings on the treadmill and fewer tendencies to imitate skinny Vikings. In hotpants.

No-one really chooses the name 'Datarock' and expects to touch--or root-canal napalm- your spirit, unless Your spirit sincerely believed the Maccabess were the new Smiths. First impressions are it's the Gang of Four dissected by Pro-Tool producers ; from commies to corporations, and wouldn't Gramsci be secretly smug, wouldn't Benjamin say 'the download is the very epith-- m'sir-- of dialectical materialist theory, the death of the artefact's aura'. Then again, the digital grind is the new lolloping of groovy limbs in post industrialised Britain and Datarock have A Certain Ratio of plastic anonymity to incorrigible beats and cunning well-spent throbbing minimalism like the melody of triceps-crunchers set to Eno-esque drones.

It'd be comforting to call this a spartan, even raw (if that weren't just-oxy-moronic) distillation of the indie-disco, a chrome-dancing endoskeleton of punked-up funk for your spotify; like a racing car reconstruction of franz ferdinand with double-tracked 'oo' harmonies like paint-jobs. But then like knopple-kneed neon pads and Crue medallions on the rows, like tin-angels on the roof of your racing car, they wheel out those smart-dumb 'validate me' moon/june rhymes cart-horsed onto some keystage 3 bastardisation of Romeo and Juliet three years after even kids from the steel-city were alluding to larkin in pop. Call it spoilers.

On the subject of Sheffs- Kate Jackson's currently band less; this sounds like a 'Couples' offcut in all its mon-orhythmic guitar parping- casio copper-plated glory just begging for some sugary-tartness, and there's a girl who does spiky arch right down to her beret-clad spots—but, guys, those tracksuits 'll have to go, it'll be glitter-ball's till dawn, not the ymc scratch-dub faceoff in Weymouth. I gather she can also sew some new threads- I say ftw.