As much as I may enjoy a night on the town one of my pet peeves has always been nightspots that enforce a dress-code at the door. As most club-goers are probably aware, such policies are often used as an excuse for establishments to engage in racism and classism.
Sometimes the exclusionism is less sinister, stemming from a desire to project a fashionably upscale image so patrons can maintain their illusion of status. But either way, I avoid any places that employ door policies connected to fashion. Not only am I just not stylish (or stuck up) enough to get into many of them myself, I feel the club-going experience should be more communal and comfortable, especially if dancefloors and sweating are going to be involved.
As such, I felt a little uneasy the first time I heard the music of Fujiya & Miyagi, a group of Brighton, England-based Krautrock (think Neu!) fetishists. It was slick and funky with an affectedly fashionable air of Eurotrashy snootiness to it that made me feel like it was the sort of music that should be playing over the sound-system in a clothing store I don’t make nearly enough money to shop in. The song was “Collarbone,” one of the singles from their sophomore album Transparent Things, a sleazy Disco-Rock strut whose lyricism verged on the nonsensical which featured a chorus about needing “a new pair of shoes” with which to “kick it” with a new lover. And regardless of my trepidation I played it — and a number of the band’s other songs (that joint “Photocopier” was super my shit) which paired abstract non-sequitur-laced lyrics with jittery, bass-heavy dancefloor grooves and spaced-out synths — alongside tunes from LCD Soundsystem and The Whitest Boy Alive a helluva lot. Eventually the tune’s signature bass riff & chicken-scratch guitar intro ended up in a Tarsem-directed Miller Lite commercial which made it feel a whole lot less hoity-toity.
Fujiya & Miyagi “Collarbone”
The band’s third album, titled Lightbulbs, dropped this week. Its lead single “Knickerbocker,” a bouncy hybrid of Britpop, Krautrock and Glam, continues the band’s tradition of almost Beck Hansen-worthy lyrical idiosyncrasy as vocalist David Best name-drops a Washington Irving pen-name, a record setting Scottish child star and an Oscar-winning film writer, producer & director over the track’s chugging bass & guitar groove. Songs like “Uh,” with its slippery bassline, hand-claps, stiff snare fills (there are shades of Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love”) and man-about-town lyrics replete with references to alphabetizing one’s record collection, still reek with the fashion-forward pretension I mentioned earlier, but groove none-the-less. But I must say I find myself gravitating to some of the more atypical sounding selections on the disc as well. Among them are the spaced-out “Goosebumps” with its proggy psychedelicism, the menstruation celebration “Dishwasher” which sounds like “Electric Relaxation”-meets-”I Want Candy” with rumbling acoustic bass and stripped-down percussion, the jazzy spazz-Funk geekiness of “Pterodactyls,” and the über-groovy “chesspionage” story-song “Rook to Queen’s Pawn Six.”
Fujiya & Miyagi “Knickerbocker”
With slick, shiny surfaces encasing a lot of fashionably snobby artiness, Fuijiya & Miyagi still seem like the kind of guys who shop at stores that are way out of my price range. Or at least, they sound like a band whose music should be on that sort of store’s in-house iPod. But their free-verse wordplay, disjointedly abstract artistic affectations, penchant for outright weirdness and the ease with which they spout obscure references and potentially embarrassing declamations betrays them as far more down-to-earth, if nerdily awkward, guys.
Their promo photo helps a lot too. But besides that they know how to get down! And there’s no way getting down should ever have a dress-code.
