Cologne label Kompakt has been home to a plethora of very fine electronic dance music over the last decade. They also occasionally develop acts, as in proper bands rather than professorial Teutonic sorts standing behind laptops with intense, funereal expressions, pale-lit by console glow. Los Angeles couple Danny and Tiffany Preston don't look professorial. In the only publicity shots I've seen they traipse through the desert dressed in Arab garb, carrying synthesisers and machine guns. It's a good look and bodes well.
Apparently the duo's first bit of kit was a Lebanese Casio with Middle Eastern tunings and pre-sets. This launched them on their way and their debut album sounds like Eighties-flavoured synthpop stewed up from ethnic sonic knick-knacks and trashy global leftovers. The first comparison that springs to mind is Talking Heads side-project the Tom Tom Club but occasionally, especially in "Jungle Bear", the Burundi drum-thumping of Bow Wow Wow is closer to the mark. While tinted with a Crystal Castles alt-pop personal dynamic and sharp musical references - the ghost of pre-fame Human League creeps about in the robot electro sound of "Papau" - Rainbow Arabia are too eccentric to fit any convenient hipster niche. For starters, singer Tiffany Preston comes on like a coy cross between Cyndi Lauper and Siouxsie Sioux, but only if both had been signed to recently resuscitated New York avant-disco label ZE.
There is much inexplicable critical frothing over Vampire Weekend's light dabbling in Afro sounds. What would these same indie enthusiasts make of this album's title track, all tribal percussion, Bhundu Boys guitar, pulsing lo-fi keyboard bass and Tiffany Preston's cartoon chant chorus? Ersatz? Clunky? Lacking authenticity? Yes, yes, and yes again. That is the point, making Boys and Diamonds a truly bastardised pop for a Blade Runner future where cultures from across the planet scrabble amid their own detritus. Which surely sounds rather exciting?
Download Watch the video for the single "Without You"
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