Denelian, August 2007 Demo

Seattle group Denelian is making music that somehow has elements of ’80s-retro, garage, and euro-inflicted dance music, but it’s fun and energetic. Their August 2007 Demo CD-R contains three self-recorded songs that’re of decent enough quality, although the levels do clash at times.

The demo CD-R leads off with “Am I Down or Are You High?,” which is the best track on the disc. It has a nice stop after the verses then lunges into a strong chorus hook that will have you rushing the stage with a mob mentality, while also making the dance floor happy at the same time. Unfortunately, I lose comprehension of the lyrics during the chorus when the instrument levels rise, but before that was a story about a kid with a lot of money that earned him some friends; then too much rocking happened and I couldn’t hear the vocals clearly. At the end of the song, the synthesizer is kind of humorously abrupt and misplaced, but it works somehow and adds to the fun.

Song two, “The Sound, The Answer, The End,” gets really synthy, and it’s all build up that goes nowhere. This song is seemingly just a reason to sing “Move your hips / To the sound of the Apocalypse.” I guess there will be sound when it happens…

The last song, “It’s Nothing Personal, We’ve All Got to Eat,” reminds me of Love and Rockets, but better, as if those guys started taking vitamins. The song is synthy but dang it, it won me over; I can’t deny that I like the sci-fi keyboard riff played during the breakdown. Then the song ends with laughter and good times.

All in all, the demo has two pretty good songs, and the other one didn’t make me bitter. But don’t listen to this non-dancer; go listen for yourself, as the Denelian website has all the songs on this demo (and their other demos too) available for guilt-free download. (I wish more bands would do that. To me, it’s silly to miss out on listeners over a couple of bucks. And look, they’ve got lots of show dates. Coincidence? That’s the one good thing about Myspace — you get to hear the music — but everybody having pretty much the same Webpage scares me, just like computerized music does.)