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Dog Fashion Disco

Adultery

Written by: TL on 18/04/2006 23:13:25

”What’s a little sin under the covers?”

Under this tagline Dog Fashion Disco markets their fifth album “Adultery” and let me just get one thing settled from the start. This is the weirdest thing I ever heard. If one was to try and describe the music on this record, words as different as punk, metal, ska, hardcore and jazz would come into mind, but I still don’t think that will cover it. When I first listened to this record, I just flipped through the songs rather casually, and to be honest, it made absolutely no sense at all. So I backtracked, read some of the promotional stuff, put on my 'active-listening-mood' and started from track 1, and boy did it open up to me!

"Adultery" is a concept album, and it attempts to tell the story of an ordinary middle-aged guy with a decent job, a wife and some kids. The album features the mind of this guy simply caving in and his life taking a rollercoaster-ride into decay, as he starts flirting with drugs and prostitutes, and eventually becomes absorbed by dark, sadistic desires and starts killing people. If you're thinking that sounds fucked up, it's because it really is!

DFD calls the music they play on "Adultery" 'movie metal', and this is no coincidence. This album features a dark film-noir-like ambience with the touch of the bizarre and grotesque views on the dark sides of human nature you’d expect to find in a movie like “Sin City” or “Fight Club”.

Actually, imagine “System of a Down” playing the soundtrack for Sin City 2, then add the dark, dusty, apathetic mood present on “Queens of the Stone-Age’s” “Songs for the Deaf”. You get something that constantly twists and changes with the satiric tone of SOAD but it doesn’t allow you to distance yourself from the universe it depicts. The mood is so complete and suffocating that you’ll find yourself stuck in it, listening in horror to the madness going on in the albums “storyline” but also being fascinated by the way that the atmosphere of madness and human decay is made so complete by the songs on this record. It’s like watching a terrible accident, wanting to look away, but not being able to take your eyes from it.

In the promo material I’ve received, the individual tracks on this album are referred to as 'Chapters'. This makes perfect sense since most tracks are so bizarre that they would be seriously weird to listen to, if you were hearing them out of the context of the album, not knowing exactly what was going on. The album consists of some ‘regular’ rock-songs like “Sweet Insanity” and “Darkest Days”, and some mood-setting tracks like “Private Eye” and “Desert Grave” (which somehow reminds me much of QOTSA’s “Mosquito Song”), “Private Eye” being the primary example of the film-noir mood, resembling a radio play with a classic anti-hero with private eye as the main character.

So this is my longest review yet I think, and I still haven’t come close to feeling like I’ve described what “Adultery” sounds like. All I can tell you is that it’s AMAZING. It’s a piece of f*cking ART, and I urge you to please, PLEASE listen to it somehow in its entirety! As a complete experience it is intense, complex, entertaining and it smears your senses with a thick sound of the devil tempting you with evil and decadent promises. I don’t care what you like. This is not music. This is a universe injected into your mind through your ears. The only negative thing I can find about this album is that the songs are having a really hard time of standing on their own. Because of this I cannot grant this album a 10. What I can do is grant it the very big and most sky-reaching

Download: Sweet Insanity, Darkest Days, Private Eye
For the fans of: System of a Down, Queens of the Stone-Age
Listen: MySpace

Release date 10.04.2006
Rotten Records
Provided by Target ApS