The Soft Pink Truth: Do You Party?

An easily overlooked feature of dance music's '80s revival is how little of it sounds like the decade as it's actually remembered. Past and present strains share plenty of sonic signifiers–gummy synth patches, brittle drum-machine breaks, moody vocoder hums–but a good deal of the current '80s wave works to resume rather than resurrect a hidden history that stalled out before it was fully realized. The most pregnant part of that history is "mutant disco," the in-between, proto-everything style swirl whose old language The Soft Pink Truth revives on Do You Party Splitting the difference between recent epochal electronic records by Metro Area and Akufen, the album pulls gloppy early-'80s club beats through a whirring cross-hatch haze aerated by laptop drive and cut-up mentality. Drew Daniel revisits lots of the same moves he favors as one-half of Matmos, but under his Soft Pink Truth guise, he soaks his sometimes-funkless head trips with a gooey infusion of booty juice. Trading on bashful electro sleaze and gauche ghetto-tech shout-outs, songs like "Gender Studies" and "Big Booty Bitches" flicker like a lubed-up disco ball, matching dryly luscious rhythms to a hyperactive sample method that sounds like a real-time broadcast of the creative process. Bassline shards and vocal shivers serve full duty in the service of groove, and deliberately sloppy fidgets fight to sound more out of place than they actually are. Equally naked and made-up like a clown, "Promofunk" and "Soft On Crime" trade on so many component parts that their seeming thickness works as an illusion of skeletal throb. Portions of the album sound clinical and removed in their adulation of mechanistic detail, but the disc's willfully amateurish airs and torso-centric brainiac games make Do You Party less a question than a foregone conclusion.