Coconut, the title of Archie Bronson Outfit’s latest dizzying blend of grooves, sounds organic enough. But from its vintage synths and sine oscillators to its spacey, sci-fi sound, the record is an inorganic pleasure.
In an era up to its space helmet in retrospective gold rushes, it’s practically impossible to listen to Coconut and think it could have been made any time other than the 21st century.
LISTEN: “Bite It and Believe It” by Archie Bronson Outfit
“This was precisely our goal,” Archie Bronson Outfit bassist and guitarist Dorian Hobday told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “It’s a challenge to use all those sounds and not end up with something crap and/or retro.”
Not that the British trio’s music doesn’t recall 20th-century standouts like Wire, Gang of Four, New Order or even an ambitious Cream. But one listen to “Shark’s Tooth” (or one look at the song’s video, below) and it’s clear that the Archie Bronson Outfit’s latest effort mines our new-millennial overload for all it’s worth, rather than relying on any particular revivalist opportunity. Gliding in and out of the orbit of drone, garage, dance and psychedelia, hardly any of the songs on Coconut, out Tuesday from Domino Recording, sound alike.
Hobday and his comrades in musical arms, vocalist and guitarist Sam Windett and drummer Mark Cleveland, hop genres defiantly. They realize that integrating the various energies of those that came before them with their own bizarro musical strain bears greater fruit than pretending to be the next Public Image Ltd.
The video for “Shark’s Tooth” is a good example of that confident merge, said Hobday, inspired as it is by Flash Gordon, manga and Sun Ra’s interstellar jazz.
“What does this have in common with the music? Nothing directly,” said Hobday, whose band cites cerebral mind-benders like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and Donald Wandrei‘s short story “The Red Brain” as favorites. “Maybe just a love of psychedelia tempered by the knowledge that it is 2010, not 1970.”
The band harbors special love for the wide variety of gear used to craft Coconut into a strange sonic fruit. The result is a hyper-real replication of the band’s own original sound, which is built out of the spare parts left over from the 20th century’s sonic signatures. Wait, I’m getting dizzy.
“We used synth guitars, sine wave oscillators, drum triggers, the Davolisint death organ, Chinese string pianos and Moogerfooger MuRF pedals, among other things,” said Hobday. “Pretty much all the traditional instruments were treated after we recorded them, so a lot of the album is a bit like a remix of the original recordings.”
Hence the disorienting title, Hobday said: “ Coconut is a dense lump, but from a warm, colorful place.”
Image courtesy Domino
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