Discovery

What if Diplo produced The Postal Service album?

What if Lil Jon and Weezer got locked in a studio together?

What if Daft Punk produced an album for an albino Kid Cudi using only samples from Akon songs?

These are the questions the side project Discovery seems created to answer. A collaboration between Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend and Wes Miles of Ra Ra Riot, Discovery is without a doubt one of the more bizarre things you'll be hearing in 2009. It's indie rock created solely with a Top 40 sound palette, the familiar bass boom and handclaps of da club paired with a skinny white dude singing in autotune about taking the subway in Osaka and missing his girlfriend. It's really hard to overstate the WTF factor the first time you listen to this. I kept waiting for Usher to start moaning or Timbo to start scatting just to ground myself in some kind of reality.

Irony abounds obviously, and nowhere more than in the album title itself - "LP", since the 5-6 good songs on here actually would've made a pretty coherent and convincing EP. Instead, the following shitty ideas inexplicably made the cut:

- A bubblegum pop song with vocals from Angel Deradoorian (of the Dirty Projectors) called "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend". Not only does that chorus sound annoying before you even hear it, it doesn't even make sense

- A cover of the Ra Ra Riot song "Can You Tell"...because if there's one thing Ra Ra Riot is missing, it's autotune

- Most unforgivably, there's a cover of the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back" that you'll be a better person for never hearing. The recent tragedy aside, this just sounds awful - like a Wesley Willis remix produced on a lazy afternoon with a few Casios and a mission to kill the soul of the listener. I couldn't do a worse MJ tribute if I tried, and I'm pretty sure you couldn't either

So yeah, it's indulgent in ways side projects normally are, but there is some great to offset the god-awful. "Osaka Loop Line" is a deceptively complex song, the tempo bouncing up and down before racing towards a shimmering climax. And "So Insane" has this singular "Grizzly Bear feat. Ratatat" sound that I want a whole other album of. Sure, this is no threat to Passion Pit for indietronic hit of the summer, but as playlist material it might just win you over.






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