The Pryor Theory

While the past decade has seen the indie kids go dance and the dance kids go indie, The Pryor Theory's 2005 formation was primarily the result of their near over-exposure to the DJ and Hip Hop scenes in Melbourne circa 2002-2005, which saw the city regularly drenched in the sweat of intense shows put on by the likes of The Avalanches (Brains DJ Sets), DJ Dexter and the Shook Daily Crew, TZU, Muph & Plutonic, and Art of War. The effect on the duo was profound, propelling them to embrace the turntable of seamless looping and crate-digging tendencies, absconding their former post-Radiohead, guitar-laden obsessions for a more altogether hip-hop bounce, sans rhymes (except in the case of Melbourne dancehall emcee Damajah's guest vocal injection on the lead track Sneaker Rat from the band's impressive debut album, El Futuro).

Though the set includes material from their infancy way back in '05, it sounds less embryonic than finely crafted, as if their musical nucleus was there from the start, and their task was not to amass a virtual armada of tracks and pick and chose the cream, but remix and re-craft the core material into infinite mutations. Repeat listens to the record reveal recurring motifs and textures interwoven amongst the crackly sampled layers that fill the cinematic corners of the album's production. There's none of the daring eclecticism and anything-goes technique of the Dust Brothers here, nor the rampant party-treacle, 4-bar revolving-door-of-hits intensity of Girl Talk, but even at its roughest, this inventive collection proves deep enough to live in. On their debut, The Pryor Theory demonstrate a remarkably mature marriage of sample infused beats with simple, soulful melodics, and El Futuro is awash in these trademark moments.

Live, the band augment their original material with an equal measure of mash-up inspired beat jacking, merging the lyrics of everyone from The Beatles to Kelis over instrumentals from the likes of Naughty by Nature and NAS. With a growing resume of appearances at festivals from St Kilda to Peats Ridge, all the way to the Big Day Out, and continued support and airplay on Triple J radio since their discovery in 2006 on triplejunearthed.com, The Pryor Theory have finally arrived in 2009 with their debut album in hand, casually confident, giggling like a couple of chuffed kids who just got out of seeing The Empire Strikes Back and are walking past a sea of first-timers lining-up at the box-office praying you won't blow the movie's "big surprises" on them. And in that spirit, the band have already announced that they intend to revert to a so-called "singles format" in follow-up to the release of El Futuro by individually releasing songs for download as they are completed. The first of these single releases, titled Remember, hints at a brasher, instrumental direction for the duo. It is scheduled for release in late 2009.