Chk Chk Chk
August, 26 2008 at Harlow’s
by CL
Nowhere is the magic more obvious than on stage. Formed in 1996 to play the all-night party scene in Sacramento, California, they´re still easily one of the most exciting live acts in the world. A 2006 UK arena tour supporting Red Hot Chili Peppers helped the band to further hone their performing skills. “We learnt that to play shows that big, you have to make the hooks hit harder.. I could feel us getting better every night”.
The last time !!! released any music was nearly two years ago, when we heard them doing strange things to Stephen Merritt´s morose indie staple ‘Take Ecstasy With Me’, turning it into a eight-minute long worldwide acid house classic: easily one of the best singles of 2005. “When we covered that Magnetic Fields song it taught us how simple it can be to write a song. All the best music is made when while discovering how to do something new. We were used to writing nine-minute songs, but playing something so simple made us rethink our songwriting”, Nic remembers. Now these dancefloor-destroying Pan-American dancing men have taken their trademark dance-funk sound into previously unimaginable territories. The ten tracks comprising ‘Myth Takes’ are denser and groovier than anything they´ve previous presented: a cut´n´paste sound-splash built from meaty basslines, spaghetti western guitars, African polyrhythms, electro house bleeps and Philly soul. It´s no exaggeration to say that there is no music like this being made anywhere else on the planet. With ‘Myth Takes’, !!! have stretched out to become truly peerless.