It's strange how certain things in music get popular, and how they seem to crystallise within the media at the moment they cross-over, the mainstream will eat and recoup the more avant-garde and obtuse edges of a closed little area of musical experimentation; for example when acid house blew up in the late 80s, garage rock revived itself in the earlys 00s and most recently the strain of southern US hip-hop which started playing around with slower beats, auto-tund and occasionally Euro house synths. So I never really got it when people start describing Lady Gaga as this Duchampian agent provocateur either, its so calculated that it's impossible for it to be anything apart from a well-manipulated marketing ploy designed to give her column inches and help shift units. She just absorbs these things, makes them palatable, and spits them back out.
Lo-fi seemed to be on the brink of exploding last summer, yet never really crossed over beyond the 18-24 bearded, single, male, demographic. It's turned out to be a blessing, allowing it a bit of space that it didn't look it was going to get. Stylistically its grown, allowing it to encompass new and even more horrible buzz words like hypnagogic pop, but musically its come on leaps and bounds with the likes of Hype Williams, James Ferraro and How To Dress Well all releasing fantastic and deep albums that did some odd work with the lo-fi template that really broadened it out. Ducktails joins that list with his third effort, Arcade Dynamics, which finds him treading the boards with an assured familiarity and a quality that can only come from working out a niche and making home in it.
Discussion seems to focus on nostalgia when talking about Ducktails, and lo-fi in general, but that makes this record sound a lot more forced than it is. It's not a nostalgia for an idealised time or place and the sounds that came out of it; but nostalgia as feeling, wave after wave of it. The difference is subtle but it means this record is effortless and laid-back, sad yet full of sunshine. Stranger moments, though, like the ten minute long album closer 'Porch Projector' sit neatly next to the bastard-pop simplicity of tracks like 'Killing The Vibe' and the spectral resplendence of 'Art Vanderlay'.
Lead single 'Hamilton Road' mixes a cassette warped rhythm section and vocal line with a crisp, golden, lead melody, but the album as a whole provides a gorgeously warm snapshot of underground pop experimentation circa early 2011.
Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics is out now on Olde English Spelling Bee.
