Black Dice's new Paw Tracks release Repo Brings More Noise to the Dancefloor

            Black Dice have successfully made my booty shake and my lizard-brain quiver with their new effort Repo.  And, while it is true that I am pretty much a sucker for their brand of crazy, Repo delivers some new sounds and a few interesting juxtapositions between sounds they have previously explored.

            One of the most notable aspects of Black Dice's new album is that many tracks draw successfully from popular dance genres without reducing the band to bland and overwrought stereotypes of electronic music.   The first track, “Night Creme” has something abstractly hip hop about it, like a noisy, hot, and sticky remix of Mr Oizo; whatever it is, you could surely drop a freestyle and convince all your friends that you were a super big dork.  Black Dice probably had some thoughts like this too:  there is some sort of unintelligible vocal track that evokes the heavily-distorted voices from the backgrounds of Beck songs.  The second track “Glazin” continues vaguely in the same direction, except rather than hip hop, it is more like dub music inside an aquarium full of sweat, as heard down a long and echo-filled hallway and through one of those big-city apartment building fire doors.   I think that there is a recognizable sample in here somewhere, but every time I latch on to it, the funny noises confuse and distract me.  However, the funny noises aren't what makes it all work on this album, unlike some earlier Black Dice efforts; for example, there are some very interesting sounds on the third track, “Earnings plus interest,” but it loses my interest before it comes to an abrupt but welcomed conclusion.

            Probably my favorite track is “La Cucaracha,” which at first suggests the Olivia Tremor Control's Late Music collages, especially the album put out as Black Swan Network.  After that comparison is played out, however, the simple beat later in the track interfaces with various odd buzzing sounds, strange otherworldly noises, highly distorted vocals, and a few guitar and synth sounds borrowed from the netherworlds of dub music to elicit profoundly geeky bliss.  The track almost seamlessly transitions into “Idiot's Pasture,” which is less impressive, sounding more like aimless wanderings on a mixing board.

            The track “Ten Inches” opens up with something that could easily be mistaken for early Lightning Bolt, but then amazingly gets even more far-out, clustering languidly spaced, but very quickly executed beat repeats (which sound like automatic weapons or short samples of motorcycle engines) with guitar and vocal noise, serving as a very pleasing introduction to the only marginally more organized “Chicken Shit,” when very flat-sounding and heavily distorted rock guitar riffs dance eloquently with mid range synthesizer sounds fairly familiar from earlier Black Dice albums, alongside clearly articulated rock drums, and a few piercing squeals for punctuation.   Later on, “Chicken Shit” evolves into a sequence of sounds similar to the namesake fowl, before fading to silence.

            For fans of earlier Black Dice albums, the most comfortable territory might be “Ultra Vomit Graze,” but Black Dice fans probably aren't particularly neophobic, so suffice it to say that Repo is both identifiably the band you've come to know and love, and an original effort stuffed with new goodies for you to unpack like sonic birthday presents, tied with little bows of silly.  

3 out of 5 Wooves