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Mr. Impossible

  • Ribbon Music

There's an infectious sense of discovery in Black Dice's latest album as the Brooklyn band finds ways to make bizarre music into something tightly structured and fun.

Brooklyn sonic alchemists Black Dice are one of those bands that started off seeming like they could go anywhere. Early singles and EPs focused on scream-laden hardcore and mixed noisy electronics with traditional guitars and drums. By the time of their proper full-length debut, 2002's Beaches & Canyons, they had become psychedelic explorers who smashed gentle drones against noise and turned it into something both violent and graceful. In the years since that masterpiece, they've cut a stumbling but consistent path through bad vibes electronics, mixing dark humor, broken beats, and generally disorienting drugginess to create a sound that they pretty much own. And though recent records like Repo, Load Blown, and Broken Ear Record have a fair amount of variety, you'd never mistake them for anything early on in the group's history.

Since Black Dice are no longer as interested in formal innovation, the best way to evaluate their new music is to just think of it in terms of tunes. Are the riffs good? Do the melodies take some nice turns? Do they use the right textures to suit the track's overall thrust? On Mr. Impossible, the answer to all three of these questions is yes. At nine songs in 46 minutes, Mr. Impossible feels like a collection of instrumentals that has a clear if seriously bent relationship to pop music.

Black Dice's sound is resolutely urban, conjuring images of percussion pulled from junkyards, strange music leaking from a broken speaker in a bodega, the bass-heavy thud of a mobile subwoofer that happens to have an automobile wrapped around it. Regardless of how this music was created and which actual instruments were used, if any, Mr. Impossible feels organic in its own rusted-out way, wholly of this polluted earth. Black Dice get funky here, too, offering up something like a lo-fi, low-technique variation on the rubbery, densely textured grooves of Miles Davis' On the Corner.

Since Black Dice's M.O. has always been at least partly about chemical-laden anxiety, it's easy to forget that they can be pretty funny, and Mr. Impossible in particular is filled with playful silliness. The "lead" voice on "Outer Body Drifter" basically sounds like a couple of fun-loving dudes trying to get a party started, but their voices have been ripped from their throats and packed together into a single gooey, wholly unintelligible ball. The absurdity of these sorta-chants over the stomping, buzzy beats sounds both darkly fucked up and also hilarious. "Pigs" is a static-soaked, very distantly countrified tune with a 4/4 thump and snarling vocal that sounds like Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top with a bloody mouthful of broken teeth. The eight-minute "Carnitas" is the most free-floating thing here, a rush of awkwardly tumbling drum hits, sax blurts, and watery vocals that flows and careens and seems constantly on the move. "The Jacker" is downright jazzy, with a beat that actually swings and a bouncy little distorto-rhythm and a snaking wah-wah'd lead melody. Even with all the unease, there's real joy in this stuff, an infectious sense of discovery as Black Dice find ways to make bizarre music into something tightly structured and fun.

In other places, though, Mr. Impossible is a little more abstract and experimental and also a bit less interesting. "Spy vs. Spy", which has squelchy synths and a vocal loop consisting of a single chipped syllable, is Black Dice by numbers, the kind of thing that seems to come almost too easily to them; listening to it, it's hard not to feel a bit wistful for when they seemed to re-write the rules every time. Still, on the evidence of Mr. Impossible, they still sound like no one else and they're still thinking hard about music and texture. When you're craving something trashy and tripped-out in this very particular way, they still deliver the properly damaged goods.

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