Casy and Brian, Catbees / All Teeth and Knuckles, Club Hits to Hit the Clubs With

Alright, so I knew San Francisco was weird as fuck to begin with, but apparently SF is the new insane party scene you always wished you were cool enough to be into but can really only shake your head in wonderment at. Based on the latest full-lengths from Bay Area electro-freaks Casy and Brian and All Teeth and Knuckles, all I can say is that these folks must throw some killer parties, the kind where too-smart, too-hip people all get together to take a metric ton of drugs apiece and spend three whole days dancing around and beating one another up before acknowledging that The Real World Outside the Dancefloor is calling.

I should note, mind you, that this ain’t exactly my scene. I’m the wallflower in the room at most parties like this (at least, parties that I’ve been to that were kinda like this), much more content to sit on the sidelines and argue with random people about why I just don’t get the appeal of Kanye than to get out there and shake my booty. But even still, I think I can get it, sort of. There’s something appealing as all hell about the total wild abandon with which these crazy club kids attack the floor.

Despite the geography, it seems that what unites these two acts’ releases — Catbees and Club Hits to Hit the Clubs With, respectively — is that kind of a shared audience. Basically, Casy and Brian and ATAK are both playing specifically to those aforementioned crazy club kids, anybody else be damned. Both records are fascinating for that, really, because of their focus on that one niche community; listening to these two discs is closer to reading some kind of sociological analysis than it is watching one of those overblown TV “exposés” that pop up every once in a while on the lurid side of clubbing.

As for what it sounds like, well…that’s where things start to diverge. While they may be from the same city, the same scene, and even the same label, musically the two acts are pretty much from different planets in the Electro Galaxy. Let’s take Casy and Brian’s Catbees first — the album’s a crazed, desperate-sounding electro-dance clusterfuck and a half, packed chock-full of sneering, goofy/angry vocals, fractured synths, and flat-as-all-hell drumbeats (possibly due to the duo’s apparent penchant for playing only on “dumpstered” equipment) and seriously obsessive about The Animal Kingdom as a whole. It’s ferociously underground, defiantly so, and the whole thing would reek of nerdcore if it weren’t so aggressively pushy, shoving the listener unrelentingly towards the dancefloor. Rather than geeking away on the sidelines, Casy and Brian are like that psychotic guy at the show who keeps drunkenly “dancing” into you no matter how far away you try to move from his little circle of strobe-lit concrete.

And oddly enough, the sheer insanity of it works in Casy and Brian’s favor. They could easily have come off as silly and pretentious, but instead tracks like “Duex Drumbaclots,” “Animal Calls n’ Dancehalls,” “House on Haunted Hill,” and the impressively dark instrumental “The Great Owl” sound like the bastard offspring of hip-hop and post-punk, like Mates of State doing covers of those Animal Collective folks, with vocal help from a speed-addled MC Paul Barman. Casy and Brian crib from Public Enemy’s angry, confrontational hip-hop, delve deep into the Beastie Boys’ circa-Licensed to Ill box of smartass attitude, smear on some of Prince’s sweat, and gleefully deconstruct the whole thing with chainsaws borrowed from Liars, and the finished product may not be easy to listen to, but it’s at least unique and intriguing.

On the opposite end of the spectrum lie All Teeth and Knuckles. Where Casy and Brian are frantic and scratchy, street-level noise, All Teeth and Knuckles’ Club Hits to Hit the Clubs With is slick and fake, self-referential to the point of being irritating as fuck, a parody of pretty much all the most ridiculous hip-hop floating around out there right now. They take the ironic hipster thing to its most inane depths, going so far as to pen a response to CSS’s “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above,” “Let’s Undress and Listen to CSS,” where singer/programmer/whatever guy Patric “Sick Face” Fallon babbles about how he met Lovefoxxx of CSS backstage at a show and basically pitched his clever song title to the exhausted musician.

The backing beats aren’t half bad, I’ll admit — the music’s funky and bumpin’ in a way that probably gets the dancefloor moving quite nicely — but damn, those lyrics. I find myself enjoying the city-proud shout-out of “The Real San Francisco,” where Fallon name-checks all the ‘hoods that get down, but I mean, c’mon, “Fuck Your Jacket”? It’s a confrontational slam on leather jackets (and presumably their wearers) that’s so silly I keep expecting Andy Samberg to pop up and start rapping. It’s a sad thing when one of the best handful of tracks on the album is essentially a couple of drunken phone calls from friends set to beats, atmospheric electronics, and gently-plucked guitars (“Blackout Dance (Interlude)”).

Some of Club Hits is catchy, certainly; I’ve got “Social Drinking” lodged uncomfortably in my brain right now. That doesn’t excuse the utter inanity of the whole project, though. One Har Mar Superstar’s more than enough, in my book. I hadn’t expected it, but I find myself sucked in by Casy and Brian’s hyperkinetic dance-racket and utterly repulsed by All Teeth and Knuckles’ studied pose.