The 2013 debut from Los Angeles-based
Robert DeLong,
Just Movement, is a revelatory mix of club-ready dance tracks and singer/songwriter introspection. With his innovative use of MIDI interfaces, keyboards, drum pads, actual drum set, laptops, and even gaming controllers (all of which he often mixes live when performing)
DeLong's music certainly rides the cutting edge of modern club music in the way the
Chemical Brothers or
Daft Punk did in years past. There is also a world music quality running through much of the music on
Just Movement with various percussion instruments that sound like timbales, shakers, tambourine, and myriad other exotic and organic sounds popping up all over the place. And while his pulsing, laser-toned beats, found-sound samples, and earworm melodies do bring to mind a kind of '90s big beat aesthetic, there is something compositional, lyric-driven, and confessional about
DeLong's music that is less Ibiza nightclub and more late-night coffeehouse in Seattle. In that sense, he seems more in line with the post-
Imogen Heap batch of electronic-based artists like
Frankmusik and
Ellie Goulding, who want to move their audiences to think and feel deeply just as much as they want them to dance.
DeLong ruminates on the nature of God, relationships, politics, and the environment, and that's just in "Survival of the Fittest." It's a grinding, buzzing, dance-punk track in which
DeLong snarls, "Trade in your school for oil or just simple education/Enough to run the country, but not enough to keep you thinking/Take my God if you want, if you want," and later, "It it's not the brains, then it's the killers who inherit the earth." Though not a traditional folk-based protest song, the lyrics on that cut and others, do bring to mind a kind of
Paul Simon-esque view of the world. That
Simon comparison is furthered both lyrically and musically on the poetic, stream of consciousness "Few Years Make," in which
DeLong, singing with a lullaby-like phrasing, details the life a young musician touring, falling in love, hanging out, even thinking further back on his childhood and trying to make sense of the meaning of it all. He sings, "Drove out east in my white car/Played at a church with our band/I got drunk and wandered off with my friend’s latest girl," and then, “I hung my own neck on a swing when I was three, I cried real hard/A coffee can; I might have died every day since then." Ultimately,
Just Movement proves
DeLong to be an immensely creative songwriter with as much a talent for critical self-reflection as laying down booty-shaking beats. As he ponders on "Global Concepts," "Did I make money, was I proud? Did I play my songs too loud? Did I leave my life to chance? Or did I make you fucking dance?" The answer on
Just Movement is always a resounding yes. ~ Matt Collar