“Not the Concept”
from the album A Million Microphones
2006
iTunes
Just like everybody loves a party band — when it’s time to party, everybody loves a smart, cerebral outfit until it’s time to have some fun. With A Million Microphones, Supersystem delivers the rare record equally at home at drunken bacchanals as at the library or pumping through a pair of headphones in your bedroom. Supersystem doesn’t achieve its multitalented sound because it’s a crack, scene-saving outfit, nor is it the most visionary act working the DC/NY axis. It’s simply realized one important fact: Smart kids want to have fun, too.
Emerging from the dance-punk overtones of 2004’s Always Never Again, Supersystem cranks up the groove and the anything-goes approach that checks everything from post-hardcore and dance-punk to world beat and soul. It’s a maneuver, both in its staggeringly wide influences and its kids-just-wanna-have-fun attitude that hinges upon the sort of party-library vibe perfected by The Dismemberment Plan before it self-destructed a few years ago. But A Million Microphones is no Plan rip-off: Where The D.C. indie heroes were merry pranksters with a contemplative edge, A Million Microphones shows Supersystem is a gang of hard-core record-collecting hipsters taking a bit of time off from blogging and name-dropping Brooklyn record stores to have a good, old-fashioned party.
Supersytem can’t shake the vaguely pretentious, smart-guy overtones that seep from this album’s cracks like so many D.C. hipsters, but it’s pretty easy to ignore the band’s ambition when its groove gets your ass moving. “Not the Concept” gets down with thick grooves that are equal parts electroclash and dance-punk, somehow managing to dust off both genres for a ridiculously catchy lead-into this album. “The Pinnacle of Existence” throws a few slip-sliding synths onto a throbbing dance-punk foundation, while “The Only Way It’s Ever Been Done” is a rock-solid disco groove under indie-rock trappings. With tribal rhythms giving way to an elastic bass groove on “Joy,” Supersystem wears its Dis Plan influences on its sleeve, but the jazz-dub atmosphere that permeates “The Lake” or the throbbing electro-noise of “White Light/White Light” ought to help dismiss the notion that Supersystem can’t get away from its copy of Emergency and I.
Although allusions to everything from jazz to krautrock to electroclash blithely twine around one another on A Million Microphones, Supersystem is more than just a bunch of art-rockers with a voracious musical appetite. It’s music for smartypantses, for sure, but even smartypantses just want to let their hair down and have some fun from time to time.