30 August 2005

[edit : mp3 removed at the request of record label.]

junior senior - "dance chance romance" (from the hey hey my my yo yo lp, import available for pre-order--though it's already out in japan!--here.)

they're like the new jake & ana, the new elton & kiki even. no, not junior & senior--after all, which one would be elton?--junior and some unidentified singer girl, whom i might think was kathleen hanna if it wasn't for the happy absence of political axes being grinded. maybe not so identified: "hot damn," junior says by way of introduction, "here comes the new girl in town," before assuming a leo sayer-esque falsetto. really, how else would you imagine a junior senior boy/girl duet to go? (early prediction: if d-d-don't stop the beat was the history of the world (1967-1977), the new album will update it to, oh, 1987 at the least.)

"dance chance romance," both song and title, demonstrates that junior senior are very likely as well-versed in the tropes of popular music as stephin merritt, and, at this stage of history, more comfortable w/ abba. this, though, is more for edwards-rodgers than for andersson-ulvaeus, witness the heart-stopping, pulse-quickening breakdown at 1:47, itself strange bedfellows w/ a vaguely middle-eastern lead guitar figure.

some time ago, i drew parallels between junior senior and andrew w.k., namely that the former are to am gold what the latter is to fm rock. though the wolf has its merits, i think awk, an otherwise peerless populist, lost sense of what his audience wanted from him; when "dance chance romance" breaks into a chorus of "yeah! yeah! yeah!" one realizes that junior senior understand who they are better than any act in pop music, and hey hey my yo yo, one hopes, will show that they're not prepared to either burn out or fade away.

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