The Dare – ‘What’s Flawed With New York?’ overview: an efficient throwback

“I feel my enamel are falling out,” The Dare sings on the woozy electro ballad ‘Elevation’, “Like in a dream of mine.” The 20-something New Yorker goes on to confess he’s so heartsick that he hasn’t “slept for days”. Fortunately, there’s an answer of kinds at hand. When the chips and down and love takes its depart, you may at all times slip in your “darkish sun shades”, get mashed and head to the membership.

It’s removed from a brand new revelation, however that’s kind of the purpose. The Dare – aka California-born Harrison Patrick Smith – has been described because the poster boy for the so-called ‘indie sleaze revival’, a nebulous and largely on-line motion that fetishises the mid-’00s. Right here was a time of digital cameras that captured 100 disastrous pictures from one blurry evening out. Photographs have been a quid, your denims have been so tight they have been in peril of crushing your Blackberry and no-one’s songs have been empowering or about reshaping the narrative. There have been numerous songs about getting mashed and heading to the membership, although.

So The Dare is nostalgia, pure and easy, from a musician born simply too late to have pulled a stranger in a regie nightclub whereas a DJ in a V-neck tee performed the Spank Rock remix of CSS’ ‘Let’s Make Love and Take heed to Demise From Above’. His debut album, ‘What’s Flawed With New York?’, trades on intentionally tinny beats, womping bass, shards of dissonant guitar and lashings of cowbell. He repeatedly shrieks and yelps as if he’s simply signed a take care of DFA Information. If that sounds acquainted, you should have heard an LCD Soundsystem tune in some unspecified time in the future within the final 22 years. He even wears a natty black go well with like James Murphy.

It’s tempting to inform Smith that Murphy desires his shtick again (alongside along with his go well with), however the pastiche is usually efficient, at the least. His defiantly dumb breakthrough observe ‘Ladies’ is likely one of the finest singles of 2006 and ‘Motion’ builds to a crunching, multi-layered cacophony that demonstrates higher musical sophistication than he’s typically given credit score for. The latter level may be manufactured from ‘All Evening’, an irresistible mixture of gang-chant vocals and featherweight keys. On comedown nearer ‘You Can By no means Go Residence’, in the meantime, he cops to his limitations and influences with refreshing self-awareness: “Typically I solely play one word / Typically I steal what others wrote.”

Nonetheless, there’s one thing somewhat miserable about music that’s this nakedly backwards-facing. Beneath the hedonism, anxiousness thrums by ‘What’s Flawed with New York?’ – therefore, maybe, Smith’s dream of his enamel falling out – and he’s clearly captured a want to return to a time earlier than Covid, earlier than pretend information, earlier than bots and pile-ons and knowledge overload. However you’d be higher off simply listening to LCD.

Particulars:

• Document label: Polydor Information
• Launch date: September 6, 2024