With Mad Professor at the helm, Django Django offer a refreshing new look at their self-titled debut album.
Roll back a decade and things seemed to be kind of doing OK.
Post the indie landfill time of the noughties, a clutch of bands like alt-J, Metronomy and Everything Everything emerged who had less reliance on the trad dynamics of Britpop and instead mangled guitars with bedroom electronica, psychedelic experimentation and an awkwardly danceable charm. Things were…better.
The members of Django Django met at Edinburgh Art College and eventually moved to London, releasing their eponymous debut album in 2012 to a glowingly positive reception even they were surprised by.
Guided by their in-house loop guru Dave Maclean, it was greeted with a stack of good press and a Mercury Prize nomination along with a healthy position in the album charts when these things just about still mattered.
Not bad for a record which, in the quartet’s own words, they thought was destined to be an, ‘underground album that would sell a few hundred copies’.
Now ten years on (really?), it’s a worthy candidate for a deluxe reissue, taking listeners back to a bubblingly creative period for a genre of music which had almost been killed off by its own inward-looking hubris.
As everybody knows by now, these exercises are – in worth-get-out-of-bed-for terms – as much miss as hit, but happily there’s a thoughtful curve ball here by way of additional material.
This comes as, instead of gathering some strictly for fans-only demos and a live set or two, the group have in typically mould breaking style offered up the source material to reggae legend the Mad Professor to rework (a role he also undertook on No Protection, a 1995 versioning of Massive Attack’s Protection album).
First things first however, even if the influential focal point of listening taste in this field has shifted more towards post rock and avant garde, Django Django was and is still no lightweight exercise in oddballtronica.
Fusing elements of seemingly whatever came to hand, the mutant new wave of Life’s A Beach is skinnily perfect, whilst Maclean’s afro-programming on Waveforms nodded excitedly towards MGMT.
Guitarist Vincent Neff has spoken of the original inspiration coming from their adopted home in the capital’s pre-gentrified fringes, which at the time was a melting pot of styles and sounds, the overriding memory being, ‘recording in Dave’s bedroom, playing at small club nights up and down the UK and taking in all the new music that was being made in east London at that time’.
The album’s standouts predictably remain as they were, with Firewater’s hand claps and easy melodies a toothsome reminder of languid seventies’ folk, whilst Hail Bop’s dragged through riffs were as if The Beta Band were reuniting, and Default was the hyperactive, fizzing indie disco anthem of the era.
As experiments go, understandably deconstructing these tracks via a bass-heavy makeover produces varying results in terms of both a radical shift and their identity as discrete projects.
Anybody who needs some demolition work doing should reach straight for the ground shaking take on Life’s A Beach, whilst the dreamy echoscape of Waveform is mightily enveloping.
The cheesy take on Skies Over Cairo gives it the full 21st century Cleopatra treatment, but the highlight is a duppy-tastic brew up of Firewater, its cavernous depth and ghostly ska riddims sending it way off towards the skyline.
Ten years often feels like a lifetime, but thankfully with this unarchiving Django Django unfurl a reminder of a blinder that retains a singular freshness, one you’ll want to hear again.
Just don’t mention classic guitar players.