I Ate My DVD Collection

Let me start this review off by saying that Ethan pleaded (pled?) with me to shut the Dragons of Zynth off while I was re-listening to them to write this review.  “It’s not music, it’s just a guy screaming over a weird guitar part and a weird drum part.”  He had only listened to the first three songs, but that’s a crudely accurate description of the first part of this album.  The DOZ want nothing more than to fuck your shit up, they said as much in an interview with the Village Voice to promote Siren.  I like to think that they’re TV On The Radio without the white guy to keep them in line – and with a little less talent.

I love DOZ, but I don’t love their music.  I like it, I think it’s pretty good.  They call their music “Afrotek”, and it’s just a bit (really, not a lot) less pretentious than it sounds for them to have come up with their own genre.  It really is a whole different animal, though; this music is fucking hard to describe.  Really, my TV On The Radio comparison isn’t fair.  Only on atmospheric “Anna Mae” are the similarities definitely there, and less obviously on closer…ahem, “Closer”, and beyond that, they are loud, they are unconventional, and they are black.

Don’t think that calling them black was for some stunted shock value or just to be funny; they wear their identity out on their sleeve here, like with the beginning of “Who Rize Above,” which combines a Jimi Hendrix-ish guitar dabble with hip hop self-introduction before launching into a raucous “beat explosion” coupled with the shouts and yelps of Aku O.T., the lead singer who can do anything he wants with his voice.  They then just jam at this ridiculous pace in their Esau to jazz’s Jacob, abrasively, but then again, they aren’t making this music so you’ll like it.  They want to “show their intent,” as they say in the above article.

The next track, “Take It to Ride”, sounds like a kind of parody of “Ticket to Ride”, but it’s really an apocalyptic version of Caribbean rap, as I understand it.  You get the little glockenshpiel (I think) figure, sounds pretty straightforward, and then you get unrelenting, half-screamed raps over equally unrelenting mashed guitars that mirror the original glockenshpiel beat.

But I haven’t even mentioned the best song on the album yet.  That’s second track “Breaker”, which, after a little pause from the opener, just breaks your skull with a badass guitar riff straight out of Guitar Hero that I did NOT see coming the first time I heard it.  It was one of my favorite moments in music that came out in 2007, looking back.  Another one comes a few seconds later, when the guitar goes almost to your breaking point in pitch, and hangs while Aku sings/yells “Send sweet, unholy breaker…” As he hangs on the “y” in unholy, the song just explodes in a fit of percussion and hard guitars which look a lot like this:

Aku O.T. being badass with a guitar

And the song goes on from there, in much the same vein of badassery.

Now, I can completely understand someone not liking this album, or not even wanting to hear it based on my review.  It’s some of the most out-there shit I listen to, and I didn’t realize it until I heard these guys at Siren right along with yawn-inducing Islands and when they gave Ethan a headache with measly laptop speakers.  I’m not going to push these guys on anybody.  I’m just happy and content in my knowledge that these guys are completely out of their minds and glorying in it.

Again, a bit of a short review, but two in one night will do that to a person.  You’re cool with 645 words, right? Right.