Good Weather For Airstrikes

And so the march of unrelenting electronic hotness continues. Hailing not from France but the UK, Does It Offend You, Yeah? are a pastiche of Everything That’s Great About French Dance Music, taking the vocoded choruses of Daft Punk, the frenzied samples of SebastiAn and the the grimy glitchtronica of Justice and bringing it together in a most holy union of dancey electronica. In simpler terms, they sound like they’ve “been eating Daft Punk and Justice tunes for three days and just took a giant electro shit”, as the “Sounds Like” section of their MySpace puts it. They also liken themselves to an “electro Bloc Party”*, and while that’s sure to grab my attention I can’t draw any similarities between the two outside of the fact that they share the same manager.

Despite the obvious influences, Does It Offend still manage a hint of originality and a decidedly-UK feel with their music. Without a formal release to their name (but a newly-signed deal with Virgin in the UK), the band are generating serious hype solely from a few circulating mp3s and word of mouth at this point. And for good reason too - “We Are Rockstars” might be the best thing to come out of the UK electronica scene since Simian Mobile Disco burst onto the scene with “Hustler” early this year. The track opens with a muffled synth line, which bursts through the speakers in all its glory one bar later before the four-to-the-floor beat drops and the track really gets going. The highlight, though, is the vocoded “We are rockstars now” verse that drops by around the halfway mark, and the catchy-ass refrain comes around again to seal the deal late in the song’s second half. A few well-timed silences followed by synth explosions don’t hurt it either, and all this adds up to make me very very excited to see what the duo can do in 2007 with some major label backing.

In the immediate future, Does It Offend will get some exposure with the upcoming release of Bloc Party’s new single, “The Prayer”, as they’ve been handed remix duties on the download-only bundle of the single release, the news of which is actually what prompted me to check them out in the first place. Download two of their tracks below so this time next year you can just smirk at your hipster peers and say you knew the lengthily-named duo way back when.

MP3s:
“We Are Rockstars” - Does It Offend You, Yeah? ((highly recommended))
“Weird Science” - Does It Offend You, Yeah?

And since I used SebastiAn as a primary reference point for their sound without ever having posted on him before, here’s some fire from the hottest Parisian DJ not named Gaspard or Xavier. Fucking loving this track.

MP3: “Ross Ross Ross” - SebastiAn ((highly recommended))

UPDATE: Gorilla vs Bear appears to be every bit as pumped about Does It Offend as I am and was nice enough to hook us up with a shout out in his post on the band. He’s also got a sweet mix from the band’s most recent appearance on XFM, which you should head over there and grab at your earliest convenience.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 at 1:20 am and is filed under Artist Profile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.