DJANGO DJANGO – Django Django

I feared that the near infinite repeat of the two syllables djan and go combined (ok, the word is repeated four times, since the Edinburgh-formed, now East london based, four piece self titled their debut album – which is nearly infinite in these days of low attention spans where reading a whole eMail is likened, by many, as having read War and Peace) will through many into a states of hypnosis.

I should have been more concerned, though, that their Metronomy-meets-Beta Band gentle throbs would cause much more damage to the collective consciousness. But ironically, it’s one of those records that through it’s apparent hypnosis actually re-awakens us from the daily drudgery – “If you walk in circles you’ll end up at the start” they wryly observe in Love’s Dart. A synth-driven melody underpins closing track,Silver Rays which sounds like the Beach Boys scoring a sci-fi movie.

Elsewhere, the future of the past is recalled and regurgitated like they are a parental bird feeding us like we’re newly hatched in the Django-nest of Waveforms; and again, only with laser beams and spiraling rainbow-spinning eyeballs in closing track, Zumm Zumm.

The album opens unexpectedly with an instrumental in a tropical rainforest which segues seamlessly into surf-version of original Battlestar Galactica in Hail Bop; a motif revisited later in the record on the aptly titled Life’s a Beach – which itself then prequels a visit to Egypt – an instrumental Skies Over Cairo where keyboard cat is the sphinx.

A dial-up modem is suped up to be in control of a space-station (side note, why aren’t space stations much more common place these days?) in Default – while a bluegrass band do glam-rock on Firewater.

Imagine if Salvador Dali woke up from a dream and said “Fuck. That one was weird” – well, I reckon, in the closing credits of the dream (your dreams have closing scrolling credits too, right?) would have “Soundtrack by Django Django” in them. – review by Andrew Tidball

9.0 / 10