I know that electronic music has officially blown up in the US, but Europe still has the market cornered on the genre. Personally, I’m partial to the sounds that the Parisians crank out.
You can always count on the French for melodic bangers. I don’t know what it is. Maybe there’s something in the water there? Or perhaps Daft Punk sonically rewrote the whole country’s DNA? Yeah, that’s probably it. Clubbers in Paris and Lyon just kept shaking it to One More Time until bright and perversely catchy melodies became a dominant genetic trait.
But BeatauCue aren’t some nouveau-disco copycats. Teion ain’t no Justice remake neither. No, they’re doing their own thing, though they aren’t ignorant of their homeland’s proud electronic heritage. On Teion, these two dudes, Alexis and Mederic, are working within the confines of something akin to trap, at least at first. Or perhaps this is best referred to as electro? The track defies easy categorization, suffice it to say. The needling, percussive opening positions it as a dirty club cut before a wave of melody in the form of a twinkling keyboard begins to creep into the mix. It all crests on a thrilling (and trilling) technicolor starburst of sound and pitched-up vocals. It’s those kind of left-field transitions that make this track incredibly exciting. It can turn on a dime at any point and at times it feels like a couple different songs stitched together. One minute it’s moonlighting as a barebones, hard knuckle hip-hop beat and then it becomes the theme music to a Japanese video game. But digging deeper, it’s clear that the structure of the track is based on a time-tested ebb and flow; suck in the listener with a little minimalism and then proceed to wash over, enveloping them in the noise. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
Just when you think you’ve got these kids figured out, they go ahead and surprise you.
