logic probe

By MusicNerd:

Logic Probe are the rare band that can tear me away from a bowl of cereal. There I was, eating breakfast, when their myspace crept out of my tinny laptop speakers. Slowly each bite began to feel more sinister, the bear on the bag of cereal transformed into a lecherous honey-stained bandit. Then Logic Probe kicked it out: rattling synths, glitches and sputtering drums as propelling as they are unsure. I was blown away; no one expects to fall in love while they’re wearing sweatpants in the kitchen.

And the best part is their recently released fifth album, Duel Panther. It continually delivers moments like that. While they do exchange some of their older echo-y spaces for nintendo noises, tracks like“Newbu” still slam distorted 8-bit bleeps against rapid bass thumps—and dare you to call it a gimmick. Late album stand out “Setsee” drapes heady wooshes over sweaty basement beats, a contrast which allows the duo to enforce both the atmospheric distance and physical immediacy of dance music. It’s a neat trick.

Logic Probe are as playful as any band with the word “probe” in their name should be. They’ve cut up jungle beats and sampled from pitch-shifted middle school gym classes, only to melt into classic trance arpeggios.

On their website they smirk, “Have you ever wanted something to sound like a ba-donka-donka and it ended up sounding like it went booop-beep-ba-dacka-lacka-chik-a-chik?” (a statement which, if spoken three times fast, immediately makes you grow an ironic euro-trash mustache.) You will enjoy dancing to this.

This is, of course, all a little pretentious, but should we make Logic Probe apologize for that? Isn’t it time we stopped pretending to like the new Kanye album to avoid looking like snobs?

And you know what? Barack Obama has been inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States of America. This should be the time when, not only do we erase the concept of an axis of evil, we erase that silly dichotomy of radio/underground.

This should be the time when the reduction to black and white is no longer accepted as some sort of authentic American purity. This should be the time when you are shaking your ass to something that embraces complexity and life and all that other shit I expect from pop music. - Publicola