If this is Dadcore then I love it. Co-opting the best bits of shoegaze, punk and In Utero-era Nirvana, Mozes and the Firstborn may have crafted the first great album of 2019. Nothing if not a little pretentious, the tracklist includes seven arty, noise and largely instrumental interludes spelling out the album title sprinkled amongst the eleven more song-shaped tracks that make up the forty minutes or so of sleazy late-night grunge that is Dadcore. All in, what we get is a delightfully schizoid collection of progressive scuzzy pop, half-realised jams and fleeting alt. experiments in a kooky, laidback form. Actually hailing from the Netherlands, while the American influences are manifest, Mozes and the Firstborn first came to ours and luminaries such as Pitchfork’s attention with their debut album in 2014 and have continued to make varying sized waves on and off throughout Europe ever since. They will tell you this new album is all about the rock music your dad listens to but the title pointedly represents the artistic anarchy of Dadaism that courses through this record like a dayglow enema and for the listener should blow a big hole in even the harshest of winter blues. Godfathers of Dadaism in music, the KLF, incorporated numerology into almost everything they did, so the seven seemingly random snippets of feedback and distortion between tracks here perhaps take on a deeper meaning although, frankly, under the loose tenets of the form that could be pretty much anything.
That’s not to say Dadcore is messy, the joyful country rock of ‘Baldy’ is immediate on its first listen, ‘Hello’ is a welcome nod to Magnapop and those early Pavement B-sides, while ‘Sad Supermarket Song’ will shepherd in the most late-Cobain accolades, the latter so close to ‘Heart Shaped Box’ at times that it’s possibly even intentional. In fact this is a record that is impossible to listen to without drawing comparisons, so this review will be littered with such referenced superlatives as fuzzy Weezerness, oddball Scousadelic creativity and the soaring shoegaze of Diiv.
‘Scotch Tape – Stick With Me’, for example is the big six-minute centrepiece built on layers of White Album absurdity and a Dinosaur Jr rolling bass groove that envelopes regardless of whether it is just a producer in-joke or not and truth is all the tracks here are equally good. The (not so) underlying sense of abstract daftness is apparent again in the gooey pop of ‘Amen’ lyrically recondite with Vic & Bob’s boundless sense of random frivolity that is essentially the flip-side of the previous KLF coin.
Massive pop moments such as on lead track ‘If I’ inject some sense of structured musical framework though, and as the listener careers through this record, these more lucid links serve to corral and correct the more experimental segments like the sides of a bobsleigh track, as if a suitably avant form of checks and balances as Dadcore stops just short of running away with itself. Outside of the constraints and pressure of a label like, say, Sub Pop this kind of free-thinking musical adventure feels genuinely radical and perhaps comparable to last year’s brilliant King Champion Sounds record for creative ingenuity with similar knowing nods to its musical ancestry (closer ‘Fly Out II’ is a big reverb drenched country ballad). They are so affable, so why do I get the feeling it might all be part of an elaborate joke?
Dadcore is released on 25th January through Burger Records.
