Whether it's going by electroclash, dance-punk, synth punk, no wave, or any other moniker, when you find a band equally stoked on keyboard bleeps and dance beats as distorted guitars and sneered vocals, confrontation and tension are usually at the core of its sound. Montreal's
Duchess Says thrive on this tension, but find a somewhat more theatrical territory on their second album,
In a Fung Day T! Charging out of the gates with the mediocre "Antepoc," the stage is set for an album of generic electroclash, but as the record pulses on, the songs get less predictable. The band shakes off some earlier comparisons to total-energy bands like
Be Your Own Pet by finding a middle ground between all-out attack and a fractured take on early goth influences. When the band slows down on "Gainsbourg," the echoes of
Bauhaus spookiness or
Siouxsie-style detachedness flutter around in a synth-heavy ambience. "Narcisse" builds on a bassline right out of
Three Imaginary Boys-era
Cure and gets really catchy and really weird with a chorus hook of wobbly keyboards mimicked by singer Annie-Claude Deschênes' wordless barks. This vocal tactic comes back in the crazy-person-on-the-bus mania of "Main District," a workout of uneasiness that threatens to fall apart from its beginnings.
Duchess Says are most interesting when they're exploring the pleasantly disjointed aspects of their sound. The dance-punk sound that artists like
the Rapture and
the Juan MacLean helped develop in the early 2000s was emulated into oblivion by a thousand lesser acts, quickly extracting any actual danger or excitement from the movement. In their most by-the-books post-DFA dance-punk explosions,
Duchess Says fall into that edgeless category. However, when they let their freak flag fly a little higher, things get really interesting and the tension and confrontation feel genuine. ~ Fred Thomas