Prinzhorn Dance School
Prinzhorn Dance School
DFA / Astralwerks
By Jose Fritz
This band is notorious for their shunning of media. They don’t do interviews or photo shoots. They exist only in darkness at the center of the dance punk universe somewhere under James Murphy’s porch. DFA Records has done for dance punk what Def Jam did for hip-hop. To that end, this record reeks of an experimental lunge: it seems even more likely when you read that James mixed this puppy himself. It must feel good to sit there twiddling knobs knowing that you’re about to flick 500 music writers in the ear.
In response music writers used words like barren, sparse, and spare to describe them. These words intimate that something is missing. I don’t like that connotation. It totally loses the intention; those wide open spaces are deliberate, not effete or inadvertent. They fill those gaping holes with tension, and anxiety for the listener. It’s the most manipulative thing I’ve ever heard that I wasn’t dating. The tension builds and goes nowhere leaving the listener feeling febrile and hostile. In other words: lots of build up but no payoff from those limey devils.
In funk they called it the pocket. A drummer, bassist or rhythm player would deliberately leave a space of a 16th note or a quarter note for another musician to fill. The technique is also used in bossa nova, and even modern dance music. We’re trained to expect something in the pocket. But Prinzhorn Dance School puts nothing in the pocket. Their treacherous plodding version of dance-punk deals out notes and beats much more frugally than that.
It’s more like a more artful 400 Blows in a way or even the French band Flin Flon, had they not been French pansies. Structure is strict and intolerant of fills, trills, guitar wanking or virtuoso anything. It’s like a later-day application of Dadaism, the original anti-art. They’re the anti-dance and the anti-punk of dance punk. The pace will not pick up enough to dance. The hostility will not peak enough to pump your fist. They dole out beats like dimes to deserving hobos and not more often.
The Brighton duo is not being cute. This is not shtick. It’s on the second listen that you’ll appreciate what they’re doing, why the pocket remains empty. Their open spaces policy toward dance punk lacks that German precision you might expect at this pace. But it still maintains that church-basement gig looseness. The album begs and pleads to be remixed. I want to get it on vinyl and play the LP at 45 rpm, and after the second listen so will you.
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