Chromeo - Fancy Footwork Review

It's always difficult to work out the sincerity of any retro-pop. Are the musicians affectionately paying tribute to a bygone era or are they being driven by shallow fashionistas and Shoreditch Twats? It certainly appears that fashion is now looking back to the '80s for inspiration, digging in the retro goldmine for something worth resurrecting....full text If Wikipedia’s to be believed, two things about Montreal electro-funk outfit Chromeo are intriguing. Both concern the guitarist/singer, Dave Macklovitch. One is that he’s the younger brother of A-Trak. The other’s that he is currently studying for a PhD in French literature at Columbia University. The dual hip/intelligent genetics thing’s a neat explicator for Chromeo, a group that, even though they might be extremely fun to dance around to, can never quite be taken seriously....full text Chromeo's Dave 1 keeps his cool, even in the middle of a domestic scrap. "Let's keep the screaming and the fighting and the crying to a minimum," he says on "My Girl is Calling Me (A Liar)", "and if the kitchen don't work we can fight in the living room," biting off that last syllable sharply enough to force the rhyme. Before the household battles, presumably, comes the pick-up, and he's good at that too: "Let me tell you that I saw your boyfriend, walking down the street," goes "Bonafied Lovin' (Tough Guys)". "He was standing all shaky, hands all sweaty, and he could hardly speak/ I might as well take a minute or two to put you on to some game: You got a boy like him, a man like me, and that's just not the same."...full text In a recent interview, Dave One, the mustachioed half of Quebecois electro-funk duo Chromeo, defended his group’s glorification of 80’s boogaloo by stating that it’s “persistence that sets you apart from being a gimmick.” If that’s the case, then Fancy Footwork, arriving three years after their debut She’s in Control, is the work of artisans rather than kitschy revivalists. Where many of the current sub-genres of dance tend to compensate a lack of songwriting with recycled samples, ephemeral flashes, and glittered fashion from the era, Chromeo painstakingly re-create those vibrant sounds and plastic beats—all the vital elements of '80s pop radio re-invented and assembled into celebratory homage....full text