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Standout track: No. 2, the six-and-half-minute “Walk and Talk,” a clackety, house-influenced slow-burner from the electronic duo that should elicit soul-searching in hardened clubgoers, assuming they’ve retained souls to search. The song stretches out for more than a minute before a contorted, spectral bellow leads into the song’s only lyric, sung and repeated with weary-eyed introspection: “My baby does K all day/She doesn’t wash her hair, doesn’t wash her clothes/She just sits on the couch watching television shows.”
Musical Motivation: “It comes from being in the dance-music world for a while and running into people who do K all day,” says the pseudonymous Sergio Giorgini. “Some people think [the lyric] is funny. We think it’s very sad.” While the band says it wants its songs to be epics, “Walk and Talk” is pretty minimal, at least instrumentally. “The vocal hook itself, we feel, is very big,” says Benoit (just Benoit), who lives in Dupont Circle. “On the dance floor it’s haunting and huge.”
Distance Learning: The bandmates, both in their 30s, met in 2008 at a party in D.C., and began collaborating in 2009 on tracks that have as much to do with house music as with the late-career art pop of Roxy Music. They’ve already put out music on one notable label, Ghostly, with a release planned for the influential DFA Records later in 2011 (Where The Freaks Have No Name is out on Visionquest). Sergio moved to Berlin last year to make music there full time, which may have been beneficial to the duo’s collaboration. An everyday musical partnership can be like a marriage, Sergio says, but with a long-distance one, “you can be like two eager lovers when you get in the studio.”