erasing clouds
 

Dat'R, Turn Up the Ghosts

by dave heaton

The cover art for Turn Up the Ghosts looks towards its own sense of fashion: a style made of photo-negative architecture portraits and neon sign- and airbrush-style logo art. Musically, Dat'r are reaching for their own style, too, and getting there. This music vaguely fits in with the recent crop of indie-dance music, and electronic-pop music in general, with drum programming as the foundation. But there's also a Cure/Echo and the Bunnymen sort of haunted new-wave-ness, and a DIY one-man-band feel (or two men, which is actually the case). It's dramatic music, but also future-funky; perhaps like a kinder, gentler, less cheesy Nine Inch Nails for the '07.

The basslines, keyboards, drums, percussion and programming together yield a constant forward motion: a dancefloor/activism/looking for a brighter day sort of motion. The lyrics, vague as they often are, augment thiis feeling, with provocations like "I like it on fire" and "Come in on the one / and make it hit". But there's resignation more than revolution behind most of this, or maybe revolution for those resigned to life's emptiness. Check this: "You can't save everything / let the earth get swallowed by the sun." Or this: "We've got nothing to believe in / but God understands." Or this: "We'd be out on the street / but we're ghosts." Consider it dance music for our global warming/war on terror world then. It's a bittersweet groove, but it feels so right.

{www.hushrecords.com}


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