After some more waiting, the new Mr Oizo EP is here. It's called Amicalement, which means something like "all the best" in French, and you can download it for free from Oizo's own freakishly-yet-wonderfully retro website, oizo3000.com. Yes, this picture is a screenshot of the site in action: humorous, practical, stylised. Kinda like Oizo's music.
If you're a fan of Oizo, you shouldn't be disappointed. Even if you're a fan of electro music, or dance music, you shouldn't be disappointed either. He seems to have moved further and further away from the avant-garde side of things when it comes to music, not necessarily steering clear of the madness of the so-called "unlistenable" Moustache (Half A Scissor) (Oizo's second album for those who don't know) but instead filtering it through a more conventional framework. Or so it seems to me anyway.
So yes, you still get things like the how-would-you-ever-predict-that pairing of Oizo and goth superstar Marilyn Manson with the not-for-the-self-conscious second track 'Solid' and its refrain, bluntly put in MM's deep speaking voice: "You look like shit when you dance". But it's set to a conventional house beat, albeit a fearsome one, locked in with gurgling distorted synth later in the track. I wrote more about it last week.
It's repetition instead of the lack of it that Oizo has recently used to whip his listeners into a frenzy. He's exchanged the spasmodic for the clockwork. Once he has a good synth melody going, it's the track that the entire song follows, adheres to. 'Unicat' first illustrates this, a gloopy cutting synth freaking out over a sparse funky bass and a meaty beat complete with 80s drum machine toms.
Personal favourite is the 3rd track, 'Waltz E More', there's more energy in repetition, a piercing analogue bleep sounding an alarm in a cyclical waltz-time soulful number, but with Oizo's fingerprints all over it, achingly tasty vocal samples etched into the minor melody. The EP finishes with more funk in 'Lovin'', an infectious bassline battling with muscly piano chords as chain of looped vocal samples lend yet more soul to his sound.
This is fantastic electro fun for all the family. Oizo has moulded something less abstract here, more conventional, more ear-friendly, swapping freak for funk but retaining the attitude that brought him up to this point. Go and download it for free.
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