Midnight Juggernauts - Dystopia

by Eddie Robson

Dystopian visions of a future filled with mediocre indie-dance

"It comes up short on warmth, inventiveness, emotion and distinctiveness, and whilst it doesn’t need all of those things, it could really, really do with just one or two of them."

There’s been a fair bit of excitement surrounding these Aussie indie-disco types, with comparisons to The Rapture, Justice and Bloc Party surfacing. Indeed, they have all the right ingredients: vintage synths, modern dancefloor aesthetics, combo of ‘live’ and programmed instruments, indie song structures. Yet their debut album, ‘Dystopia’, leaves us completely cold.

The answer seems to lie in what it lacks: it doesn’t have The Rapture’s raw edge, or Justice’s Gallic slickness, or LCD Soundsystem’s unerring ability to home in on what makes a great track great, or Crystal Castles’ restless aesthetic-shifting, or the sheer pop joy of Klaxons. So a track like ‘Shadows’, which should be a dancefloor stormer, just falls flat: it comes up short on warmth, inventiveness, emotion and distinctiveness, and whilst it doesn’t need all of those things, it could really, really do with just one or two of them. Without that stuff, the album is… competent. Potentially these tracks could come alive in concert, but on the record they sit like textbook examples of how to do this stuff, but without the necessary inspiration.

It really doesn’t help that Vincenzi Vendetta has a singing style much like Matt Johnson from The The, who has one of the smuggest and most irritating voices in music. If you like The The, you will probably disagree with this, but it’s one of the major areas where Midnight Juggernauts are lacking in warmth: the vocals are totally charmless, burbling away in the mix at a point where you frequently can’t hear what the lyrics are but you can catch the general tone. Occasionally they are enough to push the album from being undistinguished to being actively annoying.

Ultimately, everything here is done better by other people. The best tracks, ‘Road to Recovery’ and ‘Tombstone’, are decent enough indie-friendly euphoric house but if that’s what you want, why not just buy the Basement Jaxx Best Of or something?

Be the first to comment on this article