La La Land – ComPact

DJ Bog is a good DJ. He plays all over the place. He is one half of this project along with Bizarre Contact. Who also gets to play all over the world. La La Land is a masturbatory collection of dancefloor “stormers!!” purely designed for effect. Those effects are: make people on drugs dance about, get paid money, and shag chicks after we’ve finished playing. This is firmly the gear with this album folks, I’m not kidding. There’s one dazzling track, a couple of decent moments, but the rest of it is mindless, fuck-you-in-the-arse pap. Technofood is recorded with Aquatica and the sounds of the two (okay, three) artists involved moulds well together. But then it peaks, then goes has an anthemic run for 32 bars, then it stops. Over so soon? Visual Contact is a – sorry, it’s THE - good track, it crunches in with a beefier urgency and is deceptively gnarly: the moodiness of the bottomend gives rise to an atmosphere of anticipating and foreboding. It then explodes into acid and becomes a resolute, undeniable dancefloor belter. Okay, I would sooner it didn’t have the “yo dj!” and random-woman-orgasming samples, but what can ya do. Technology is a fairly annoying stop-start peakmonkey with a sample that I think is lifted from X-Dream, with one of the most annoying builds of the year, followed by a complete let-down of a main run. Welcome To Mexico is downright abhorrent – clearly a dancefloor-geared thunker to ensure these guys go down well in Cancun, its main ingredients are (1) thunky dugga dugga dugga, (2) daft breakdown and (3) dreadful melodius breakdowns. It then goes into a euro-cheddar final run that’s about as pleasant as having teeth pulled. I’ve tried but I can’t make myself listen to the finale. Visual Sunny Day is recorded with Electro Sun and the flips and tricks here are pretty nifty – it phases in and out at the end of the cycle, and moves along in a nifty way, but it doesn’t really accomplish very much. And as for Dreamland… it starts out okay, with these nifty tricks again, before it crashes like a coachload of tourists down an embankment, into a cringe-making melodic run. There simply isn’t enough MDMA in the world to make melodies like this sound even halfway good. Gain Over is probably the best example of anything on here, it’s the same formula as the rest of it but the melody isn’t offensive, and the energy is driving enough to keep the focus exactly where it should be. Duty Freaks, recorded with Dooper Doopler, is the most musically interesting track on the album (shuffles aplenty, loads of drops and tweaks, and a very very weird sound for the most part). It drops into adequately tight fullon for the last couple of minutes. Finally you’ve got the worryingly-named “Tarim Ta-Off & Kick The Boy – Live Mega Mix” the first half of which is refreshingly restrained melodic stuff, the second half darker but ultimately directionless. I think the thing with these guys is they want to play and create fullpower, mayhem-ridden melodic KILLAHs to cane at dancefloors around the world – get loads of people smiling and dancing, and then get a shag when it’s all over. There’s definitely musical talent in the heart of what they’re doing, and I can’t help getting the feeling that if they lost sight of those predefined goals and just concentrated on making good music, they could be a whole heap better. Come back in five years.