Since being another day deeper into the week hasn’t done much to improve my outlook or demeanor I fully intended to make another attempt at easing into my routine this morning with some appropriately subtle background music. But upon rummaging through my stash of recent music releases I found nothing that stood out for an ability to not stand out at all. At this I turned to the handful of new and as-yet-unlistened-to albums that had piled up within the last week or so and began picking them at random and hitting “play” on the first track. This almost immediately yielded the results I was looking for. Or so I thought.
The sudden satisfaction I felt resulted from the sound of waves of tribal percussion building slowly, adding layer upon layer, until a subtle melody emerged amidst the din and, with a roll of the snare and a splash of the cymbal, a thudding drum beat and watery electronic bassline turned the orchestra of primitive clatter into a ritualistic Techno chant-a-long. The song was “Pontiac,” the lead-off track on arcane-themed, many-membered Chicago-based collective Mahjongg’s forthcoming sophomore LP, and K. Records debut, Kontpab. Having supported their last album, 2005’s Raydoncong, a record that gave Funk-infused Punk and playfully melodic Indie-Pop a jagged, droney, lo-fi electronic makeover, I was a bit taken aback. Had a band who’d previously sounded like !!! (Chk Chk Chk) and Of Montreal getting beaten with a drum-machine by a entheogen-addicted nihilist Goth suddenly morphed into a sun-drenched ethno-industrial Disco-Gospel ensemble? As the closing seconds of “Pontiac” ticked by an answer loomed.
The growl and whine of synthesizers that open the tune “Problems” offered up that answer; a resounding “no.” With it’s synths joined by a steady, pummeling drum-machine beat, a detached monotone vocal, dreamy chimes, cheesy electronic percussion and guitar work that’s alternately both chunky and funky, “Problems” sounds like Nine Inch Nails if Trent had a fetish for early-’80s Electro-Funk and R&B. Boasting panned guitars, jumpy drum-programming, deep rolling bass, awkwardly spoken/rapped verses and ghostly sung chorus “Kottbusser Tor” sounds like a Hot Chip jam, or what would have happened had Prince left Minneapolis to attend RISD, where he joined a certain arty Funk-Punk band who would move to New York, never link up with Brian Eno, and instead benefit greatly from the purple one’s production acumen and fascination with the LinnDrum and synthesizers. Late-’60s style Acid-Rock meets retro-electro video-game noises and old-school Chicago-House synths on “Tell the Police the Truth.” While the mix of jittery drum-programming, sedated vocals and nervously robotic synths on the reverb-heavy “Mercury” make me think of Ian Curtis guesting on an El-P track.
Mahjongg “Problems”
Even though Kontpab proved just as crazy as Mahjongg’s last record, which wasn’t exactly what I was looking for this glum morning, it wound up being exactly what I needed. And it proved something else entirely in the process; namely that while a day might not make any difference (sorry Dinah Washington) in your life, a record just might.
-El Keter
