Javelin
Aug 12, 2010
Tracks
- 1 C Town
- 2 Moscow 1980
- 3 Mossy Woodland
- 4 On It On It
Tonight, We CAN Dance
Words by Sean Moeller, Illustration by Johnnie Cluney, Sound engineering by Matt Oliver, Mastering by Sam Patlove
We are served here by a group of men who take the side of a building and just splatter every color of paint they can find against it. The throws leave impact splotches and kick back plenty of paint onto the throwers, now visibly connected by the action that they've perpetrated. They open more cans and keep flinging it, making it into a collage that will cover every inch of that wall before it's all over. They will make certain colors meet other colors, mix with them and touch in ways that seem arbitrary to most people but are, without a question, nothing of the sort. They serve to create a work that doesn't appear to be following you with any eyes that it may have, but a work that you follow, that you feel possessed by, as if you were boring a hole straight through it, unable to let it release you. You find yourself stalking the colors and the dripping of them, the collision of movement in their twining ways. You find that your parts are hypnotized and there's nothing much that you can do to get around it. You're air-drumming and moving in ways that you don't typically move in. Brooklyn's Javelin asks you, both explicitly and implicitly, if you want to dance and you answer with your body, but the kind of territory that they take you over during these dance parties is that of weirdo jammz and freakily morphed remixes - or parts that seem to as if they were inspired by the art of the remix - into these strobe-lit plains or warehouses that you'll never be able to find again the following day, after sleeping it all off. The songs on "No Mas," are bright and shattering thrills, matching an unpredictable progression with some pieces that sound like old friends. We hear parts of Madonna and things that remind us of Four Seasons lyrics and such - sweet and irresistible pop lines, bleeding into these synthesized collaborations between wild experiments and a dream world that likes to skip a beat. These seem to be the dance parties that we throw in our heads, where the girls are into us and everything feels as if it's on point - we're smooth, the night's smokin' and all is right, albeit somewhat off-kilter because we're the ones involved. The two chief architects of the group - cousins George Langford and Tom Van Buskirk - let their songs bust open like piñatas, spilling all of their computer-brained goodness all over the floor. We just prance around in the mess as if it were high on the 1980s or simply without inhibitions to tell us we can't dance. Because tonight, right now, we all can fuckin' dance and we're doing it whether we should or shouldn't.
Luaka Bop Records
