This is the best record that you will hear all year. So there you have it. Of that we’re pretty convinced. We’d be doing you a disservice and forming false impressions on your behalf if we beat about the bush in reaching that as a conclusion. It’s looking remarkably difficult to build a case against it, we hardly think we’d be stepping out of line by taking it as fact. It will make most other things you’ve heard so far this century seem like a formality. It gives art rock a good, nay great, name and lays down solid justification for New York remaining the unshiftable centre of the musical universe in 2004.
There’s no growing on you, no repeat listening required, and no ‘getting’ it. Though imaginatively eclectic and practically without peer, by the culmination of ‘The Wrong Way’ you understand this record completely. It has such a clear idea of itself, even if nobody else does. Come track 2, ‘Staring At The Sun’, you’re agog like a child with their lips trapped in the absinthe bottle. There are reference points, because everything has reference points, but there is no coherent family tree, no immediately traceable lineage.
In a different way similar was said about roster-mates the Pixies back when they were brand new, but that’s so hard to put into context nowadays as practically everyone owes them a debt and their influence is cemented into the foundations of alternative culture. And anyway, they were all about formula and blueprint. ‘Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes’ shuns that as a concept and refuses to take directions, preferring to hitch a ride on passing genres – from swing to jazz to shoegazing to new wave to hip hop, soul and funk. It leaves you light-headed and astonished. It drives them, without exception, to bright pastures of immense freshness.
In the main the glue for this record, if you can call it that – nothing’s so much as held tentatively in place, everything drifts and ebbs and floats – is the droning atmospheric work, bowling ‘Loveless’ shaped washes all over the backdrop. On top of that it’s largely anything goes. ‘Ambulance’ has acapella barbershop rhythms and sub-gospel narration. ‘Wear You Out’ has psychedelic blues licks, helium soul, jazz flutterings and more. ‘Dreams’ has minimal hip-hop beats, keyboard humming, a building purpose and the funk.
There’s something out-of-body about everything here too, which is the most affecting thing. Nothing’s ever running at full pelt, each aspect need only push as hard as it has to, each strand passing focus to the next in poetic relay. Nothing’s wasted, and the aim is not to put you under any duress. If you’re looking for a soundbyte, and they’re not, then what about My Bloody Valentine getting fucked up with Prince and Stevie Wonder in some crazy ethereal back alley? In case you missed it, this is the best record that you will hear all year.