Review Summary: ugly crying like a burning cop car // alamo check this
SOLID CHAOS POP is back. Dai Dai Dai are rainbowshit luminaries and they play a revoltingly oversaturated, irresistibly volatile brand of idol pop interlaced with digital hardcore, breakbeat, chiptune and, inevitably, noise [pop] - the kind of thing that people who dislike J-pop surely have nightmares about, and not without good reason. Their music is inconsistent as all fuck, but phenomenally gratifying at its best and undeniably entertaining even at its worst. High-risk/high-reward is appropriate for this kind of excess, even if the project has previously struggled to fine-tune the balance between the two: their 2020 landmark ∅ was impeccable in its palette, but leant a little strongly towards hit-or miss pop songwriting, while last year’s
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth took their noisier aspects to self-sabotaging extremes, only fleetingly boasting the ecstatic hooks and feverous energy that made them so infectious to begin with.
But why take one extreme at the expense of another? The group’s latest,
MAYBE PERFECT stuffs its pockets with every superlative in sight. It’s more aggressive, more unstable, more adventurous and (yes)
more than any of their past output, respectively discarding and graffitiing their hitherto tenuous structural and stylistic continuities to the point that you could question whether it even qualifies as “pop” to begin with. Their trademark electro-sugarhooks do crop up time and time again, but they rarely sustain entire songs, instead abruptly yielding to parodic heights of bass violence, dissonant chord cascades, and, on the perplexing “Manuke”, obtuse levels of I’m-not-really-sure. Saccharine gratification and obnoxious turbulence upend one another at the drop of a hat, and the fractured song structures are powerless to cushion the impact. It’s rare to find a record that takes such an active delight in derailing itself, and a joyful listener will have to share producer Oglaorzzy’s mockery of all things continuity if they hope to make it to the end grinning.
It’s a fucking handful, yet in its own warped way, it’s also the most cohesive, fully-released Dai Dai Dai release so far. Anyone on board with the group’s founding charter that chaos=gud will find that
MAYBE PERFECT’s volatility takes on a livewire energy of its own, change being the only constant yada yada. While standalone ideas are treated as playthings and moment-to-moment pacing is largely cosmetic, the album finds enough guises of unpredictability that its avalanche of batshit picks up an unsettling amount of momentum. This finds a nucleus of sorts in the breakcore centrepiece “LASE”, the album’s most cohesive cut, and it briefly comes to a head in the poppier “Hakai Sareteshimatta Object”, but – most importantly – it’s means that there’s still a shape, or at least a dialectic, at work when all goes to hell, as on the frenetic central section of opener “THRO美美NG”. All of this is of course fantastically unsustainable, but the album’s half-hour runtime wisely concentrates its sensory gauntlet for maximum impact, flirting liberally with the idea of a burnout but never to the point of a slog. Appropriately enough, the closer “Kuro no Sabaku” is composed largely of a melancholy vocal refrain over skittery glitches, wavering autotune and soothing arpeggio cycles: the group are out of batteries, it would seem. Can you blame them?
Anyway, trust Dai Dai Dai to make both their most consistent and most erratic record in the same package.
MAYBE PERFECT is still a little choppy in its brilliance to be truly, uh, perfect, but it sustains its frenzy with such intensity that it’s easy to overlook, say, 1byou”’s listless vocal refrains and “Manuke”’s muddy meandering. If it’s a novelty record, it’s shrewdly formed as such; if it’s a pop deconstruction statement, you’ll struggle to find the same extremes repped with the same glittery savagery or unpretentious glee anywhere else. Great fun either way.
