MUSIC . Hang The DJ

This '90s Future

J. Edward Keyes on Shuffle


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Published: May 13, 2008

Even the most casual of pop culture observers will note, as we lurch yet again into another long and mostly unfulfilling summer festival season, the lack of bands from the aughts at the top of the bills. In fact, the bulk of this season's headliners — Stone Temple Pilots! Dave Matthews Band! Radiohead! — got their start 10-plus years ago, with a select few of them (Roger Waters, this means you) going back much, much further. It's not too hard to suss out the reasons why: The mid-'90s was arguably the last time American music fans experienced what the critic Robert Christgau referred to as "monoculture," or great swaths of people liking the same band at the same time. Perhaps in 10 more years, everyone will just have their own festival.

M83

Saturdays = Youth

(Mute)

Santogold

(Downtown)

This trend has started seeping into recorded music, too; consider Santogold, the first record by the performer of the same name, who got her start in the late and not-particularly-lamented Philadelphia band Stiffed. Her debut is a hot-pink jukebox full of 45s by Siouxsie Sioux, Missing Persons and the Cars, all of them slightly reconfigured to suit Santogold's gothic pout. The record, fortunately, avoids being a decoupage of rubber bracelets and hi-tops, mostly because Santogold is good at instilling each song with a bit of ominousness. Benign reggae tune "Shove It" chugs along on a steady one-drop rhythm until it hits the chorus, where Santogold sings, over and over, "We think you're a joke/ Shove your hope where it don't shine."

Slightly prouder of its influences is the French group M83, essentially the pseudonym for one Anthony Gonzalez. M83's latest, Saturdays = Youth, is the kind of record tailor-made for people who fantasize about Kate Bush covering New Order and vice versa (this writer among them). Its charms, including the miraculous first single "Graveyard Girl," are as easy to apprehend as used copies of Substance. It's crammed with blue-sky synths and long, bright cascades of guitar. Ethereal vocalist Morgan Kibby even coos the phrase "The hounds of love, they bite our heels." The big problem with giving it up so easy, of course, is that it doesn't leave much to go back for. Each spin through Saturdays is a little less wonderful than the one before it, making its pleasures rich but fleeting.

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)