With so many bands orbiting the Shape Shoppe performance/recording space and its associated label, Obey Your Brain, sometimes I think it’d be easier to keep track of them all—and all their overlapping members—with a graph plotting just how complicated and frenetic each is. Then I could just point. Chandeliers would fall in the quadrant defined by the “relatively simple” and “mellow” axes, a ways off from the jazzers in Herculaneum and a world apart from the freaks in Man Man.
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Chandeliers’ new album, The Thrush, like another recent Obey Your Brain joint, Icy Demons’ Miami Ice, revels in electro-funk’s prime years and packs in enough musical references—from Zapp and Kraftwerk in the 70s to Moroder and Prince in the 80s—to safely imply that everyone involved has an absolutely killer record collection. (In keeping with Obey Your Brain protocol, the two records have some personnel overlap.) But where Miami Ice is an amphetamine-laced party starter, The Thrush is better suited for the chill-out room. “Mr. Electric” opens the album by crossing live, in-the-pocket drum beats that could’ve been lifted from any good midtempo 70s R&B number with a fat analog-synth bass line, resulting in a new kind of tight, minimalist modern funk. Then, apparently too forward-thinking to sustain the mood, the band brings in some cooled-out keyboards that relax that tightness and feed into the IDM-inflected mellow of the next track, “Maldonado.”
The Thrush closes with a remix of “Body Double,” a track off the 2006 seven-inch Circulation (Ghost Arcade), with the original’s Moroder-esque drive muted and its sharp edges rounded. This return to the same type of groove that opens the album brings things satisfyingly full circle. I don’t know whether Chandeliers plotted this looping effect to encourage putting the disc on repeat, but it works. I speak from experience.
By the time word of the discrepancy had diffused into the blogosphere, intrepid hackers were already coming together in impromptu forums—e.g., the comments section of the BitTorrent-sharing site Pirate Bay—to figure out the best way to extract the Guitar Hero audio and produce a dynamically richer version of the album. At press time they were still debating the optimal technique, but one version that sounded better than the original was already available.
Count Bass D with Josh Abrams and Jeff Parker headline; Abrams also spins; Sun 9/28, 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433 or 866-468-3401, $8, 21+.
