Lissi Dancefloor Disaster: Superlative Overload

Don’t get me wrong, writing about the titular New Band A Day is always a pleasure, never a chore, but while I never tire of the bands themselves, occasionally the process can become a grind.

Some days, though, that ennui is shunted away in a laser-blast, ray-gun, neon-coloured POP BLAST. I’ve been looking forward to writing about Lissi Dancefloor Disaster‘s new, brilliant EP, ever since LDD’s lovely Johan sent me a preview a month ago.

Lissi Dancefloor Disaster have been an ANBAD favourite for about a year since I saw them at In The City and I subsequently became first a fervent unpaid band promoter; then interrogator, probing them in a surprisingly revealing BBC interview.

Anyway. Pop Musiiic is pretty much the best thing I’ve heard for ages. That’s a hugely ineloquent sentence – what’s new? – but I’m too busy having fun listening to their music to care:

I was so pleased by the spasmodically darting keyboard break at 0:45 in this song that I broke one of my key rules, and left a breathless comment on the Souncloud player.

Here’s a song take plays by those well-worn rules of Perfect Pop, and then careful-carelessly pours the contents of a hundred activated glowsticks all over them; all whilst perfoming some freaky dancin’.

I’d hoped to type something insightful and, urgh, smart about Lissi Dancefloor Disaster’s music, but have ended up blurting a lot of messy superlatives and only quarter-baked analogies instead.

So here’s the TL;DR version: this is the best pop music you’ll hear this year. They deserve to be as big, as, oooh, Roxette, at least. Now that’s praise.

MORE: lissidancefloordisaster.com/blog

>My Awesome Mixtape, and How Faux-Nostalgia Never Had To Press Pause/Play Between The Fade In/Out

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I’m old enough to remember actually making mixtapes and feel slightly aggrieved at the spasms of faux-nostalgia that accompany their mention now.

There’s a reason no-one’s made a mixtape for about 15 years, and I don’t recognise their creation being the winsome TDK C90-flavoured labour of love that’s bandied around now.

For anyone under the age of 18 who would like an accurate portrayal of the grim reality of the task; imagine a Spotify playlist, and then imagine spending about three hours to compile and record it, to write down the songs on a minuscule rectangle of card, and then to present it nervously to a girl who doesn’t even like you anyway.

So, when faced with a band called My Awesome Mixtape, I’d expect a C86 – Twee Pop Lo-Fi throwback band too. And, not for the first time, I was wrong. Playing songs called Me And The Washing Machine apparently confirms any bedroom-Indie preconceptions, and yet My Awesome Mixtape make shiny, luxurious pop.

Me And The Washing Machine

A song that ponders such mundanities as ‘you and me and the laundry’ does dip a toe into fey Indie waters, but this navel-gazing sits at odds with a manically bouncy Euro disco beat which courses through the song like a day-glo spinal column.

And How The Feet Touch The Ground yearns, hopes and swoons – an untainted, charming peek at love, and hope, and worry.

My Awesome Mixtape are from Bolognia, and so are inherently touched with the wonderful chaos that permeates Italian life. Their songs try to run in half a dozen directions all at once, clutching on the way at cute pop, Euro-disco, and sharp Scandinavian folk. Perhaps that Mixtape moniker isn’t that ill-founded after all. Delightful.

Apologies for late post today – ANBAD’s web server (Dreamhost, FYI) died for a while.

>ANBAD on Euro-Tour: Euro-Pop vs The World

A POST THAT IS PART TRAVELOGUE, PART EURO MUSIC NEWS:

Right now, as I write this, I’m sitting in a tent. Right now I’m somewhere on the Northern coast of Spain. Right now, the thick fog has lolloped in off the Atlantic and licked everything with sticky warmth. And right now, the couple in the tent next to me are playing, on their stereo, a variety of songs of their choosing.

This is one of the many dangers of camping, of course – the cobweb-thin tent walls leave you compellingly at the mercy of your neighbours’ noisy wills and this, otherwise likable couple, is their music. I have never been a fan of The Killers, and have studiously, obsessively avoided hearing their music, but now I’m trapped in a hellish mock-rock cell of my own making.

At least, having now been force-fed all their albums, I can truly say that I have a new all-time least favourite song. I don’t know what it’s called, but the chorus drones the same woeful flash of enlightenment over and over – ‘It’s Indie Rock ‘n’ Roll for me’. As a sentiment, this is so incredibly trite and banal all at once that perhaps Brandon Flowers deserves a medal of sorts.

I can think of nothing less ‘Indie Rock ‘n’ Roll’ than exactly and specifically that line – and I speak as someone who once saw Travis live in concert (by mistake – long story). How anyone could maintain any musical credibility after penning a line like that is beyond me, but such is the will-sapping nature of mainstream rock sometimes.

I used to think that music tastes on the continent were a bit safe – and it’s true that U2 (or Ooh-Dos as they’re called here) are horribly omnipotent – but actually I think they’re as bland as they are back home. Music here is just bone-headedly dull in a whole new way. Aside from vast swathes of generic rock, which could simply be foreign language versions of any Kooks B-side, is the wonderful, stupidly-skewed Euro-pop, which continues to delight and madden just as much as ever.

The songs literally all sound the same, and the only distinguishing features are slight variations between the deceptively complex hi-hat/kick-drum/bouncy-bassline slurry, are the manically stupid vocals. I heard two – two – separate groups of teenage schoolgirls singing the hook of one offender – “I wanna take you dance, dance, dance in the disco/Oh aye-aye, oh aye-aye/ I wanna take you from Paris to San Francisco/ Oh Aye-aye, oh aye-aye” – the other day.

This song, which I subsequently heard on Crud FM, and is now welded to my brain, is only beaten in the banality stakes by another, which repeats, monstrously, “I wanna take a ride in your discotheque“, until you start weeping blood. (Please note that it is not the Lady Gaga song about disco sticks, but is it’s very own awful, altered beast.) They may have both been written by the same evil genius for all I know.

And the point is? Well, the point is that I’d crawl over hot, Swine-flu-infected shards of glass to listen to those songs back to back for a day – hell, two day – than ever hear that Killers song ever, ever again. Until then, here’s that Euro-disco song, by someone called, unbelievably, Arsenium, to drive you mad, too. And I insist you do listen. Your life will be the better for it.