Album of the Week: Voices of Black, Plastic Dolls

Album of the Week: Voices of Black, Plastic Dolls

7 January, 2011 | 5.48AM

• Written by: Alex Hughes
• Filed under: Music News: voices of black, wolf + lamb

Wolf + Lamb Music roll out a curveball with the debut album from Voices of Black, a duo hailing from New Jersey via Providence, RI. Plastic Dolls is billed as a concept album about models—"a celebration of the fraud, the lust, the glam, glitz and glamour of the runway, the scene, and its long lost followers.”

We can only hope they’re being ironic (and indeed, it wouldn’t be too hard to draw parallels between fashion wastrels and the world of perpetual after-partiers). In any case, you can more or less forget all about that: despite a couple of interludes featuring vapid voiceovers from presumable PYTs, the concept never gets in the way of the music. This isn’t an album for high heels and champagne soirees: it’s a plunge into stumbling derlium, a deep and sensuous Codeine dream.

True to Wolf + Lamb form, second-hand soul and disco plays a crucial role, with deep house grooves cobbled together out of sampled breaks and loops—some instantly recognizable, some less so—and fleshed out with detuned synthesizers and shuffling drum tracks.

What’s curious, or confusing, or both, is the way that their beats sometimes slip perilously out of sync, as they do two thirds of the way through “Disco Jackie,” when it sounds like a DJ losing his grip on the decks. This kind of slack, slippery vibe is presumably intentional, and if you’re in the mood for it, it can lend an agreeably druggy feel; then again, you’ll want to know these tracks well before you test them out.

As an album, though, it hangs together remarkably well. Like a bleary-eyed soundtrack to an after-party that never, ever ends, it takes the highs with the lows, an undercurrent of anxiety running beneath the bliss.

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