The Lambs are Angry

Laserdisc was a completely missed technology. I remember being about eleven when my neighbours in Western Australia invited around to watch Spacejam on Laserdisc. It was amazing a huge optical disc that played (to me) exactly like a video. I remember at the time it seemed so futuristic but also incredibly unnecessary and already superseded like Blade Runner or the 80s imagining of Back to the Future.

Mr Oizo's Lambs Anger reminds me of Laserdisc. It sounds like the future but a retro analog future that has already been surpassed by electro mainstream pop. The album pops and bleeps in some kind of disco homage to dark 80s arcades and it seems as though in another reality music could have possibly gone this way; that Mr Oizo is the technical superior when it comes to French dance music but it is just too awkward to be truly popular.

The album cuts so close to awesome banality but just avoids it in every track. 'Cut Dick' is a great dance track carving a great beat and building a stairway into nowhere not for the rise and fall but simply the groove. 'Positif' sounds like it could be a trance winner with it's high driving electro brutality and 'vous etes des animal' (or whatever she says) but then Mr Oizo punctures the song with disco samples and an 80s drum machine and there isn't anywhere the song can belong but some alternate future where Laserdisc was the technology that won.

Don't take the obsolete technology comparison the wrong way: I love this album the same way I love polaroids 35mm film and holgas. It is satisfying; difficult and no one will understand the appeal.

Here is the clip for Positif; not my favourite track but it has some sweet beats: