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Album Reviews
Album Review: Shit Robot – From The Cradle To The Rave (DFA)
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 13 August 2010
DFA Records has always existed in a retro-futurist bubble. The label’s releases tend to combine the essence of decades old material with a contemporary bent. Shit Robot’s debut album is no exception, taking its inspiration largely from Chicago/acid house and disco. The results are a continuation of the classic DFA sound: relentlessly jacking, molasses thick basslines seep through each of the album’s nine songs mix with the reassuringly ever present doof-doof-doof of house’s 4/4 heartbeat.
But is this enough? Put it this way, in years to come we’re not going to be hailing ‘From The Cradle To The Rave’ in the same way we salivate over Luomo’s 2000 masterpiece ‘Vocalcity’. That’s not to say that it’s without its charms, however. The tracks with the guest vocalists, including Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip and The Juan Maclean’s Nancy Whang, are near-brilliant exercises in dancefloor efficiency, and previous single ‘Simple Things (Work It Out)’ featuring former Nation Of Ulysses frontman Ian Svenonius is, in turns, a paranoid, jittery jack-track and a hands-in-the-air piano house classic.
It’s the tracks where Shit Robot’s Marcus Lambkin provides the vocals that cause the interest levels to drop: his pitched-down incantations (“Are you ready?” intones the opening track ‘Tuff Enough’ over and over again) and occasionally less than inspiring backing tracks result in an uneven record. The good stuff, however, just about outweighs the bad. JAB
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