Death In Vegas "Satan's Circus" (Fuel)
By Trey Perkins
Thursday. Jun 30, 1:18 AM
More bloops, blurps, blarps, bleeps, sweeps, and creeps than a break-dancing robot caught on fire.

Satan’s Circus, the latest release from the electronica-post rock bleep core outfit Death In Vegas, combines studio tracks and live tracks. Death In Vegas’ star has risen, as their music made Sofia Copolla’s cunt so hard that she decided to use the track “Girls” in Lost in Translation, a Japanese stereotype tour de force… oh yeah, plus there was some shit in there about Bill Murray running merrily with lonely and sad Scarlett Johansen, but actually sleeping with some sleezy lounge-singer who gives “Scaraborough Fair” the worst treatment I have heard since I tried to lip synch it in fifth grade. But I digress. Satan’s Circus demonstrates Death In Vegas’ penchant for not fitting into one cardboard cut-out genre. Throughout the album, we get a nice mix of micro synthesizers, moogs, IDM drums, acoustic drums, sweet baselines, and blurps, farts, switches, sweeps, bleeps, and creeps.

This album really is more of an ode to the synthesizer, and what a history that dear instrument has had. Starting with Walter Carlos Williams’ Switched on Bach, the synthesizer’s promise as an instrument has expanded. Satan’s Circus rocks the synth in such a way that would make Walter Carlos Williams’ non-existent penis turgid and erect. Why non-existent? If you Google Williams’ you’ll find out right quick that he is now Wendy Carlos Williams. That’s right, sometime in the mid-‘70s he had his junk divided into four quadrants and invaginated. Williams’ arrangements of Bach on a moog ain’t got shit on the first two tracks of Satan’s Circus.

Ambiguous sexualities and synthesizers aside, Satan’s Circus demands the listener to constantly listen for the nuanced songs, as they defy classification in some bland typology. “Ein Fur Die Damen” begins with a tight beat: played on acoustic drums no less. After a few measures of a great sounding acoustic beat – they really do sound amazing – we get the bloops that we so richly demand in this heady day of laptronica. The first disc, all studio tracks, bombards the listener with a cross pollination of electronica and straight up punk rock. No surprise really, because, when I first saw Lost in Translation and heard “Girls,” I thought it was Air. The sighing girly voice and the vintage sounding organs made me question my masculinity and feel French at the same time. However, it turns out it’s Death In Vegas, and while “Girls” is a good five minutes of washed out guitars and organs slowly building to a crescendo, Satan’s Circus proves to be an entirely different mammal all together. Like Williams’ shocking transition from man to woman, Death In Vegas go from sounding like an R2 unit filled to the brim with crystal meth, to a complex punk/post-rock outfit on tracks like “Anita Berber.” Live tracks on the second disc reveal how well they reproduce the complex arrangement that we hear on the first. They truly are as tight live as they are in the studio, as the recordings from a series of Brixton shows reveal.

While I do enjoy the bleep core, I wonder if the market for this music is somehow as clogged as the arteries of some fat ass who survives on three Big Macs a day. We already have groups like Air, who demonstrate the same kind of versatility as Death In Vegas, so what can we get from DIA that we can’t get from Air? Furthermore, with the advent of the micro-Korg and the proliferation of computer-based music recording programs, the breed of electronica we have on Satan’s Circus has become less difficult to create, thus making the music genre itself less interesting to listen to. Brian Eno put it best when he commented on the state of ambient music nowadays. When he was doing it in the mid ‘70s he had to develop a working knowledge of tape loops so as to make them cohesive. Now, with such technologies obviating the need for such expertise, Eno concluded that he could take someone with a slight amount of music knowledge and train that person to use the technology and within 30 minutes produce a listenable product, but not an interesting project. I wonder, with all the proliferation of electronica acts like Mouse On Mars, Air, Aphex Twin, and of course Death In Vegas, if we aren’t witnessing the same thing with a different genre. In other words, what do Death In Vegas do that other bands of a similar genre don’t do?
www.deathinvegas.co.uk
www.fuel2000.com

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Trey Perkins

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