Send "Datarock " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Countless bands hedge their music with heaps of irony (arguably vice versa in some cases), but few buttress it with Datarock's technical prowess. Sure, the Norwegian duo has its eye-rolling moments about night flights to Uranus or dancing with their daddies, but they also sport some of the slickest dance production in the biz, not to mention their effortless traversing between neurotic post-punk licks and coked-to-the-gills 1980s synth pop. While convention would say sophomore LP Red will have its share of "growing up" moments, there's already something artistically mature and high-concept about two guys jury-rigging their own sub-genre of kitsch disco to one-up the legions of more "serious" Talking Heads/Eno knock-offs floating around today. Red isn't exactly austere, but its lapses into wistfulness jolt Fredrik Saroea and Ketil Mosnes out of the bizarre but stable niche they carved out on their 2005 debut.As a quick glance at the track listing shows, Datarock's going pop on Red, boiling their songs down to a compact three minutes rather than going nuts with the dramatic dancefloor builds. These songs also have premises beyond shouting goofy shibboleths. There's a song consisting entirely of Talking Heads song titles ("True Stories"), an electro metal album opener about the Internet ("The Blog"), and a chilly kraut-funk apostrophe to Molly Ringwald ("Molly"), to name a few. While the lyrical craft here ain't exactly Dylan-esque, the duo shows off a level of cleverness that previously tended to level-off at wordplay and dick jokes....full text |
| Clashmusic |
| The opening of this album is pure science fiction cinema: we hear a massive audience cheering, while digital soundbytes [sic] rant over the top, too distorted to interpret. Rave beats start glowing into life, while evil synths bear down like oppressive robots. Somewhere up above, a spaceship hovers like a big blue whale, burping out space bubbles into the cosmos… Welcome to the future, Datarock style. This album is loosely designed as a conceptual guide to an alternative reality where the 1980s and the forthcoming 50 years are melting into one era. And if you think that sounds a little bit loopy, wait till you find out that one song here – ‘True Stories’ – lifts all its lyrics from Talking Heads song titles....full text |
| Sputnikmusic |
| The ‘80s live again (and again, and again) on Datarock’s second proper album, the ominously titled Red. With its dystopian album art and the crazed cyber-punk vibe of opener “The Blog,” one unfamiliar with Datarock might misconstrue Red as a twisted version of the future through the lens of Orwell’s 1984, where technology rules supreme and human emotions are in danger of dying out. A few more songs in, however, and it becomes clear that Datarock are the most reverent of ‘80s worshippers, taking all those glorious synthed-out romantic soundscapes and making their own millennial homage. Generally lumped in with the mid-2000s wave of electro-rock revivalists (see: LCD Soundsystem, Hot Chip, Klaxons, etc.), the Norwegian duo’s debut was a fittingly funky dance-punk jam, a record tailor-made for kick starting any hipster party. Red continues that proud tradition, but almost wholly submerses everything into a ‘80s fugue in an effort to pay tribute to their most important influences. And when I say submerse everything, I mean it – Datarock has claimed that every instrument used on the record was manufactured prior to 1983, song titles reference multiple pop cultural touchstones of the decade (“Molly” is, of course, about that heroine of so many Gen-X youths, Molly Ringwald), and one song’s lyrics (“True Stories”) is made up entirely of Talking Heads lyrics....full text |
Datarock lyrics
|
| |||||||||||||
