Type "The Bang Bang Club" into Google and you're forced to trawl through websites for two night clubs (one in South Africa, another in Berlin), a Danish electro-hip-hop outfit and, more famously, the Apartheid-era photojournalism collective, before you get anywhere near finding out what this particularly incarnation is. So, what are we looking at here? The answer: a British duo by way of Brooklyn, whose bio includes A-Ha, Ask Pizza, The House of Blues Eyes (a fashion fraternity based out of Shepherd's Bush) and an "unprintable proposition from Janice Dickinson", mention of which entirely failed to pique my interest, inspiring only a loathsome distaste for this sort of teasing that I thought I had left behind at primary school (anyone else really hate it when you're the only one not "in" on the story?). And so, feeling thoroughly unenlightened and resolutely uninformed, we turn to the music.
And what do we have here? Plasticky, fizzy as fuck, synth-pop, with Scissor Sister-like vocals mashed with a lot (and I mean bordering on "break out the lawyers" levels of similarity, particularly on the chorus) of Empire of the Sun. It's not entirely unpleasant, certainly not unlistenable, but it all feels like little more than a cut and paste collage (I imagine being part of the fashion world the group are used to that sort of arty thing) of influences and scenes. Despite the essay of PR fluff (is a whole page of A4 really necessary for a one-song promo?), it doesn't feel like that they're doing much more than aiming squarely for that multi-coloured fun-zone found somewhere between MGMT, La Roux, Digitalism and (God forbid) Mika. It'll get the kids dancing, of that there is no doubt. But for a duo that talks about David Bowie and claims not to be artists of a "too cool for school" nature, it feels a little bit artificial, a little bit manufactured and a little bit like we're simply being force-fed the latest musical fashion trend, rather than anything that has any thought or effort behind it. And for a song that talks about sounding "significant" and which includes the line "All I ever wanted/was to feel something real", it all feels laughably contrived.
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Much like my furry boa and tie-dye skin-tight one-piece combo (it looked good in the shop is all I can say), I do rather wonder whether they'll still be on rotation come winter.
The Bang Bang Club online
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