Dat’r Thursday, Dec. 3-- Local Cut

Dat’r Thursday, Dec. 3

December 2nd, 2009 [6:07AM] Posted by: Casey Jarman | 0 COMMENTS

After a yearlong hiatus, the Portland dance duo returns more focused than ever.

IMAGE: Melanie Brown

[DANCE POP] Datr’s forthcoming album will not be titled Dry Humpback Whale. Nor will it contain a song called “Boston Blowjobs.” It won’t be classified as “fluff,” “upper management rock” or “lovemakin’ musixxx” once it gets into your iTunes. Yet these are all labels attached to the unfinished disc the duo sent my way last week.

“Oh, that’s Paul,” says a laughing Matt Dabrowiak of his musical other half, producer/multi-instrumentalist Paul Alcott. “We pick really, really bad working titles—we try to pick incredibly embarrassing and ridiculous ones in the hopes that it’ll convince us to change them.”

When the duo’s new dance-rock album sees release early next year, it’ll actually be titled In Defense of the Corporate Jet. The disc—which currently stands at 11 tracks of lovingly crafted and bombastic analog-electro IDM-pop—is the group’s first full-length since 2007’s Turn Up the Ghosts. Dat’r is one in a handful of groups that funneled dance music into Portland’s indie-rock scene before the current bumper crop of basement-friendly electro-pop groups took flight.

But Dat’r has been off the radar lately. Dabrowiak and Alcott spent most of 2009 working on (and occasionally fighting over) Corporate Jet: Dabrowiak, who co-founded the band to make music that sounded like the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, has wanted the group to indulge in drawn-out grooves, whereas Alcott prefers chaotic structural shifts and the occasional chorus.

Corporate Jet is turning out to be a balance of both visions: Dabrowiak gets his pulsing, hypnotic rhythm section, and Alcott gets to layer exotic synths (Dat’r now sounds more techno, if also more structured, than ever before) and percussion. Though the pair claims common inspiration from bands like the National and the Shins, the group’s sonic reference points sound a couple decades older: Genre-twisting party groups like Big Audio Dynamite and Pop Will Eat Itself echo throughout Dat’r’s catalog. It’s perhaps more a spiritual connection than a conscious decision: Like those groups, Datr’s members cut their teeth on rock music. Previous to Dat’r, they rocked alongside Dabrowiak’s brother—singer-songwriter Nick Jaina—in math-rock troupe the Binary Dolls. “We don’t really come from a dance music or electronic music background,” Dabrowiak says of Dat’r. “It ended up being electronic music because we couldn’t find enough people to play with.”

The lingering indie-rock aesthetic comes across both in Dat’r’s hyperactive live show and in Dabrowiak’s focused songwriting. Which is not to say he’s a straightforward lyricist. “When the trees are on their knees/ When the city’s assets freeze/ I keep it in the home/ Get the mayor on the phone,” Dabrowiak sings on “Complex Concept.” No clue what that means, but the syllables sure sound nice over Alcott’s electro-Cuban percussion and Afropop guitar work. And the words make sense to him, Dabrowiak says.

“That’s one of our issues with dance music: The lyrics are usually like ‘shake it, shake it’ or ‘get your ass on the dance floor,’” Dabrowiak says. “We try to always make sure to put the songs first. If something just seems like a good beat with some lyrics attached to it, I see that as a failure. We’ve kinda weeded those out.” A full year of weeding later, and Dat’r’s ready to hit the stage again.

SEE IT: Dat’r plays Thursday, Dec. 3, at Holocene, with Velella Velella and Head Shop Boys. 8:30 pm. $5. 21+.

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