Simian Mobile Disco – Unpatterns

Those blog-house ruffians dealing in nerd-chic haircuts and magnetic blip-blooping ruptures certainly did make 2007-core a lot brasher. Here they were : club kids, encroaching on indie-rock blogs like they owned the place, happily piercing the hoity-toity, guitar-drums-bass conventionalists’ ears. It also didn’t hurt that, transcending all the keyboards, Simian Mobile Disco rocked pretty hard. They looked good, they sounded good, they fitted like jigsaw puzzles into an unspeakable number of great mixes throughout the late noughties. I mean, sure Cross was more elegant, but try spinning ‘I Believe’ only once.

So what does Unpatterns invert? Texture? Resonance? Statements? The tittering critical emulsion that washed over Attack, Delay, Sustain, Release certainly wasn’t thinking about how those lippy Londoners would look in 2012. Surprising, considering how reductively futuristic and blatantly fashionable they once looked. But perhaps this is the best step they could’ve possibly taken. Faced with veteran status and all the arced implications that come with a “third effort”, James Ford and Jas Shaw are making the music they love, a deep, dark, and often irresistible techno record.

I’m not gonna wax poetic, or solipsistic for that matter. SMD have always etched tunes free of all that chin-stroked discourse anyway. That’s why a gigantic diva-house hook cascades over twitchy body-funk on ‘Seraphin’, or why ‘Put Your Hands Together’’s relentless bass drum overdrive feels wonderfully retro and hugely revamped at the same time. These are kids who grew up and nurtured taste on acrylic floors, catching rays in the red and green lasers, filling notebook margins with DJ charts. This is their eternal night; Unpatterns is a cool cackle of fearless pop passion, the moment where they seem closer to us, and themselves, than ever before.

There’s a dark undercurrent slithering underneath, even in the brightest flares, like a constant reminder that Simian is saving their biggest fold for a different attitude, but I’d like to think that this is who they are. Sinister House, Techno With Fangs – a smug confidence you would punch if the grooves could let you move. It would be a defining DJ set if they didn’t write all the songs. The flocked painlessness to their flow is something they worked very, very hard for.

Yeah, I guess it’s just a dance record, the same way most things are just a dance record – Delicacies, Personality, The Devil’s Walk – all well-regarded albums from well-known guises immediately paved over because, well, we’ve got Important Stuff to spin! Leave it to the artful miners and Resident Advisor best-of lists – Unpatterns is unfairly a utility work, wonderful and singular, but not quite transcendent, and it can feel that sometimes, in a webzine’s impossible quest to straddle all the art, the watershed moments unfairly overshadow all the really good cornerstones. Unpatterns won’t move your brain, but it will move your nerves, and that should be enough for you.