By the time the retro spelling lesson that encompasses the entirety of “Digitalism in Cairo”‘s lyrical content is audible enough to figure out (“F-I-R-E-I-N-C-A-I-R-O”…oh! The Cure! I get it!), you wonder why you even bothered to figure out what was being said.Īnd good god. The connotation of those locales would lean toward the exotic the execution, by contrast, seems rote. As the album progresses, certain themes keep coming up Cairo, Jupiter, and lots of dance beats should make for a wonderful little journey, but the connections between the three are never apparent. “Magnets” is all cut-up, repeated vocals and glitchy noises, slowly developing and revealing itself to be superficially danceable but not much fun at all. Starting the album with “Magnets” is a bad first impression to make. The problem, then, is that Digitalism has a habit of doing just the opposite of what makes “Pogo” so fun. If only more modern music could be so user-friendly. There’s no hidden subtext, there’s no aspiration toward artistic legitimacy, just… “Pogo”. “Pogo” works on this level as well - it’s teeming with those strutting guitar lines that the boys in Franz Ferdinand just play the hell out of, the vocals are one part David Byrne and one part Devo while the lyrics say absolutely nothing at all, and the proper dance that one should perform while listening to it is explained in its one-word title. It’s like Daft Punk with more melody and fewer tongues in cheeks. Example: Closing track “Echoes” is a perfect little techno-influenced track that features no words whatsoever it simply shows up, establishes a techno-influenced beat, tosses in a few heavily-affected synth-derived melodies, and ends. Purveyors of a sound, the two halves of Digitalism (Jens Moelle and Ismail Tuefekci) truly clicks when the sound is all that is required to make a certain track function. Digitalism, in turn, also provides none of these things. These guidelines don’t include pop hooks, or lyrical flourish, or instrumental virtuosity. Unfortunately, these guidelines don’t include soul. It is unquestionably electronic in ways that propogate throughout its debut album Idealism, complete with plenty of the “new wave” bands like New Order and Information Society that paved the way for the idea that this sort of music could one day be thought of as “retro”. On these grounds, the band that has decided to call itself Digitalism succeeds on all counts. Finally, there will be a retro feel to the music, as the idea of digitally-dominated this-or-that is something that pointed toward the future 20 or 25 years ago, but seems relatively old hat today. Two, which follows assumption one rather closely, the electronics will have a fairly uniform feel throughout, lending the band the feel of adherance to the made-up movement defined in its name. When a band gets together and decides to call itself “Digitalism”, there are a certain number of assumptions being made: One, unless the name is caked in irony, there will be a rather sizable electronic component to the music that this band will compose.