The latest thing in electronic music is the capitalization on the secret everyone knew in High School: Nerds have more sex. Hot Chip is the most obvious example of this sudden geek cache, wearing their hearts on their scrawny sleeves as they bang on cowbells to slinky, crotch-pumping beats and smooth 80s keyboard melodies.
Brooklyn's Body Language pushes this envelope forward in two ways: 1. They blur their electro tendencies with live instrument weirdness and knob-twiddling, veering into Wham City's chopped-funk rather than Big Beat. and 2. They are all actually really sexy people, even if they are more likely to obsess about vintage analog keyboards and Etsy rather than money and toned abs. They may be nerds, but they are not afraid to talk dirty or blend re-re-appropriated world music touches from fellow nerd-rockers like David Byrne and Phil Collins (you heard me).
The band is playing at the fantastically artsy space The Fridge this Saturday, so we asked them for a preview of some of their tracks. Their answers are wonderful, but I still think they should have stuck with HotRawSex for the name of that one song.
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Work this City summarizes the premise of the entire album, which is a little story of us growing out of our college town and moving to Brooklyn. The recording session for wrapping up this track was quite magical - we all just found the perfect synth patches and samples and phrases all in one evening. Even JPrez, our fellow DJ party thrower, threw down some handy synth work. Before we knew it, the song was basically done just before we had to go downtown to play our weekly party at Vegas. We scrambled together a quick mix and popped it on at the party - success!
At a Glance is a glimpse into our early early work as Body Language when we were writing a lot of downtempo material as Landau. It's just about mackin' it to some lady - "Just glance at me one more time, and I'll show you how it be"
We love how Sandwiches came together. We were practicing for a show and we had two instrumental tracks cued up - a Detroit-style track that we wrote and Jimmy Edgar's unreleased hit 'HotRawSex'. We were goofing around dropping lyrics on top of the Detroit track, when we noticed that lyrics from the Detroit Grand Pubah's 'Sandwiches' fit perfectly on our track. Once the Sandwiches chorus came, we dropped Jimmy Edgar's track on top. For the first performance of Sandwiches we did this little mashup live, but on subsequent versions we recorded our own unique parts so we wouldn't have Jimmy coming after us ;) Hewas definitely a big inspiration for its creation though.
Another group playing this Saturday (besides our bestest friend Ryan Holladay from Bluebrain dropping some solo work the week before the show with his brother) is Alvin Risk, a local dance music collaboration so excited for their first big coming out party in DC that they made us a Vimeo so we could preview their stuff.
And here it is!
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/10004913[/vimeo]
That's hot.™ See you there hotties.
God loves a cheerful giver.
Awesome! gonna be good
Saturday will surely rule.
sounds like its gonna be a fun show. wish i didn't have work
body language is the shit!