Mission Giant, Golden Triangle

You know, every record starts off with a review. It’s that little dirge the band writes describing their record and how good it is and how much better than the others so that I will review it and you will buy it. And usually, like New York-style pizza in Texas, it is all a lie. Lies, people.

Unbelievably, Mission Giant are not liars. Really. This is incredible. Think Hot Chip with sexual tension and angst. You people put on your sneakers, hop into your used cars, and go find this record. Then wait ’til midnight, go find back roads, and ride around alone with the windows down and just absorb it.

That is how you experience Mission Giant’s Golden Triangle: play the whole thing out and absorb it. It’s an 18-track oddity stuck in an age of 12-track records with 8 tracks of filler. There is little in the way of filler. And most of the “filler” cannot even be regarded as such; they’re transitions furthering along the overall product. Beginning, middling, and closing the record are “I-35e s,” “I-30w,” and “I-35w n,” forming the big-picture map. Along the way is a world full of weird things off the exits of the freeway.

For electronica, Giant achieves impressive variety. They combine spacey, pad-driven soundscapes with uptempo, drum machine-driven Devo rockers. Lyrics show up only seven times, with samples of odd spoken-word bits here and there. The vocals shudder with sexy, trippy nervousness, spouted with an ’80s-sounding attitude.

If you’ve ever wondered how a nerd writes a love song, jump over to track six, “Dark Love.” Who writes like this? “I like it when you calls the shots / Being bossed around gets me hot / I remember your forget-me-nots / I think about your hair a lot.” A nerd. A nerd packing some edgy witticisms on being the bitch in the relationship but too in love to quit, all the while backed by 8-bit flourishes ripped from an ancient Sega system. Bitchin’.

Mission Giant aren’t just making noise with their circuit-bent toys, game systems, and plethora of synths. They are making music, dammit. This is no bad acid trip into noisy electronica. This is it for electro-dance-rock. Catchy melodies, crazy-as-hell drum machines, and some serious geeky white-boy pride.

Taken individually, only maybe four songs would stand strong. But I don’t see that as the point of this record. It should be taken together, as a completed masterpiece where the sum of the parts is what’s important. Roll down your windows, dammit, and take it all in.

As my eight-year old brother noted (true story) after hearing “Type A” for the first time, “This is booty-shaking music! Play it again!”