Stop what you're doing. Now. Log off your computer, run to your nearest indie record store, and buy Bran Van 3000's Discosis while you still can. Their record label -- the Beastie Boys-founded Grand Royal -- just went under, so I'm anticipating future distribution problems for this disc. And I'd hate for any of you to miss some of the best music being made today.
Bran Van 3000, for those unfamiliar, is an artistic collective originating in Montreal. The members of the group bob and weave into and out of projects, into and out of songs, yet astonishingly, their material maintains a definite cohesiveness within its varying modes.
I first got to know the group through a neat little ditty called "Drinking in L.A." a little over a year ago. A smart tale of would-be filmmakers slacking their way through their 20s instead of getting things done, it was one of the most clever dance tracks I'd heard in a while, and seemed one of the great one-offs of the era. I didn't anticipate, though, that they had an entire album's worth of such smarts in them.
Until I heard this year's Discosis, easily the most intelligent dance album made since Deee-Lite was getting its swerve on a decade ago. But instead of Lady Miss Kier advocating funknbooty as a solution to environmental issues, the anonymous lads and lasses of BV3K stick to affairs decidedly more personal in nature. Love, sex, partying, shopping, dancing, various permutations of all of the above.
Consider Discosis the aural equivalent of Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," only retitle it "Fifteen Ways of Looking at a Pop Song." There's that much ground covered here. Bran Van unpackages a lost Curtis Mayfield gem for the lead single "Astounded" (one of the best songs you'll hear this year, by the way), producing an unforgettable update on the "I gotta dance to keep from crying" theme, and tossing in some Cuban figures for good measure. Then they play with some variations on the girl-responding-to-commodification motif in "Loop Me" and "Loaded" (as in, "get fuckin' loaded"). They extol young love with stunning precision and humor in "Montreal" and "Love Cliché," and show startling awareness of the record biz in "Rock Star" (a track troublingly prescient of Grand Royal's financial troubles to come: "dreams locked in the record company"). And they even manage to rattle off a spirited tribute in quasi-rap to Bruce Springsteen on "Speed," effectively thanking the Boss for making so many songs to have sex in a car to.
For an album that bounces at many odd angles, Discosis maintains a peculiar unity when listened to straight through. You'll dance madly for the better part of an hour, but you'll also stop at several points to listen more closely to certain lyrics and movements. The sign of a truly great record, hindered only slightly by a thorough avoidance of traditional verse-chorus structures/resolutions and by a needless remix of "Astounded" at the very end. Small nits to pick, though, in a year where so few discs are so delightful and refreshing and sparkling and forward-moving.
Joseph McCombs | November 25, 2001
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