[music] GRUMBLE GRUMBLE - Casual Sex: The Demo (grumblegrumble.net)

[dot_fennel]

If that title/subtitle pairing is an intentional double-entendre, it's genius... but this is, in fact, a demo, and the mp3s sound kind of fizzy. Absolutely Kosher are selling these four songs on a CD, and will release the full album just as soon as it actually exists. I am totally looking forward to it.

Though the band rocks, the music is sometimes spacious and rarely quite 'rock', which may be how they ended up with AbKo (generally a haven for music made by people who've wandered all the way out to the trash fence but come to the conclusion that you can be experimental and still go verse/chorus/verse: call it post-post-rock if you like hyphens). But the vocals are unmanneredly calm; I'm drawing a blank on antecedents unless you count the guy from The Ocean Blue, and he only sounded that way because someone told him British people were mellow.

In fact, the whole demo defies categorization without being that strange. Every stylistic clue that I think might make it all click turns out to be a red herring, starting with the motto "DISCO IS THE NEW DISCO" on the band's downloads page. I can see how lovers of disco might end up making this music, particularly with disco's recent rehabilitation and the attendant absorption of other 00s sounds into its shadow. Yet the songs are so far from disco that the slogan is solely phatic.

If you're in a hurry, download "Not Not Nervous" and "Pardon My French" first.