Search - Bran Van 3000 :: Discosis

Are you a tramp like that? are you born to run?

Ryan Hennessy | Albany, NY | 06/06/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Bran Van 3000's 1998 album Glee was hailed by many to be a great pastiche of genres, and I'll give it that. There are a lot of different sounds piled in there, but the problem I had was that it felt like it was darker than it should have been. It's hard to explain it, but it sounded like there was a happy album wanting to get out there, but the band was feeling too bitter to let it fly, and there's a number of pointless interludes and boring songs thrown in there. Discosis, I was pleasantly surprised to hear, lets everything go. The six-minute opener dispelled any fears I had of more cumbersome rock and rapping. The Bran Van guys found some old vocal track that Curtis Mayfield recorded, but never used, and somehow got the rights to use it in their own song. So they made a whole song for the Curtis track! The music is just what you would expect when you think of the word "discosis." It's really dancey, has dramatic strings segments, is slickly produced, and it sounds like it's basically swirling all around you. The Bran Van girls is even back Curtis up on the chorus, "All I wanna do is love you / I just wanna take you there." And no less than four minutes into it, what sounds like a couple of Cuban guys take over the vocal duties in their own language, while someone goes absolutely wild on a flute solo. This is the song for the your party mix.Although their first album sounded unbalanced at times, this one bearly misses a beat. The songs are packed together and even though their throw the genres around, the songs all have a similar type of sound to them. Also, as with the first album, they recycle vocal tracks using them on more than one track. So we actually get a preview of "Senegal" in "Montreal" and a reprise of the Cuban singers in "Discosis." It's a really effective way of making the album more cohesive. Oh, and if you noticed, there's a whole slew of special guests brimming with indie credentials. Bran Van 3000 has always been more like a collective than a band with people coming and going as they please, so this all fits in fine. Loop Me" is a sultry space-accented lounge kind of song, although I think it goes without saying that anything the Bran Van girls sing turns out sultry. Their voices are perfectly fit for an album like this, with of its tongue-in-cheek disco stylings. The "Loaded" and "Speed" combination is another in the natural progression of things idea. "Loaded" is sung by the girls and is basically about partying and drinking a lot. "Speed" is like the antithesis, a beautiful acoustic-turned-rock-turned-rap song from the same girl, except it looks like she needs someone to put some excitement in her life. ("So hold on / Take me with you! / Hold on / My soul is on!") She wants to ride someone's motorbike, and this other guy starts rapping and it turns into a sort of quasi-conversation. As the song moves along, the music seems to gradually build and speed up until at the end the guy is yelling "New Jersey girl! / We gonna ride around! / New Jersey girl / New Jersey sun!" It's really just a wonderful song.Globe-hopping, genre-plundering, tongue-in-cheek and bringing it all back to the nightclub. It doesn't get any more cosmopolitan than Bran Van. Oh, yeah, and what's most amazing: They're Canadian."