Peplab: Drive

Remember not so long ago just as the ’80s were closing into the ’90s and the alternarock explosion was just about to hit? When Madchester would spill into Seattle which would spill into every city that had a college full of kids fed up with anything remotely resembling hair metal — the music that had dominated the latter half of the ’80s? Yeah, when that explosion took place and shook up the industry, it seemed that anything could and did happen. Bands no one had ever heard of were suddenly charting left and right. MTV’s 120 Minutes went from cult status to the thing to watch on the weekend when you wanted to see what was currently hot or going to be big in music. It did so well that it spawned a sister show, Alternative Nation geared for the primetime audience. Back before The Real World and Making the Band. Back before the music industry turned on itself, biting itself in two over sheer greed — an act that continues to this day.

Like the ’80s, it happened somewhere around the middle of the decade. Kurt Cobain killed himself, Eddie Vedder turned more reclusive, and Chris Cornell cut his hair. Hey, I was never a big grunge fan, so I put little stock into any of that, but in between there, it seemed as if the industry just threw up their hands and gave up. Suddenly, we were all about tuning in to that 9-18 year old demographic. What the hell? We went from one of the greatest rock and pop renaissances and turned right around and jumped into the teenybopper boiling pot. Fuck rock and roll, let’s support choreographed dance acts. Oh, and by the way, everyone loves the ’70s again.

Why this last fact occurred, I’ll never know. Hey, I have nothing against the ’70s, but I suppose my Generation X needed to get back to the womb and let the baby boomers re-live their teen years by any means necessary. (And Gen X got That ’80s Show in return — even we weren’t dumb enough to think that was a good idea.) But with that nostalgic turn, popular music also started grasping on to anything that had a disco beat and a vocoder. No one’s forgotten Daft Punk already, have they? Well, if you have, it’s understandable. That wave of nostalgia produced as much byproduct as the revived bubblegum mainstream. And this was already leaking into the new millennium. Short term memory loss, indeed.

It’s not lost on Peplab, however. While their new album Drive is filled with all sorts of retro beats, disco-soul harmonies, and plenty of vocoder to make even Mr. Roboto choke on his own voice, there’s something determinedly underground about this affair. Sort of like how Fat Boy Slim used to be before Spike Jonze helped make him a household name. So, in a sense, I can see Drive having the ability to break big and endorse sodas and Target, but at the same time there’s something here that might keep it from doing so.

Is this good or bad? Frankly, I think it may just be flat out ironic, as there’s nothing really here that would make an indie or underground hipster really raise Drive to the heavens and pronounce it as Cool. And that doesn’t mean the album is bad at all. Formulaic in parts, yes. Slick to the nth degree, yes. Destined for the same dustpile as Daft Punk? Perhaps. But it is worth a few good listens, and that’s more than I can say for everyone else putting out a dance/groove album out these days.

Peplab mixes the organic with the computerized, so it’s not an all-electronic affair. And that may be one thing that makes it feel a bit different. The lushness of opening track “Wondergirl” is the perfect thing to go driving around to, even if the vocals are almost too annoyingly nasal. You’ll overlook that and keep feeling the musical groove. This song, in fact, almost makes one nostalgic for the early ’90s when everything was a go.

“Lucky Lucky” visits a slick faux-soul groove and manages to get funky nonetheless with its thick bass lines, silly smooth vocal harmonies, and blasts of orchestra strings and electric piano. “Pornstar” quickly revisits this with mixed results, sounding exactly like Daft Punk with its vocoder choruses. A bit too early on the nostalgia for my tastes, but it’ll certainly hook enough other people. In fact, this may be less Daft Punk and more Eiffel 65 (guilty for their annoying hit “Blue” not so long ago). Or maybe it’s a mix of both of them.

“Beautiful People” mixes some good funk guitar samples and retro-fitted disco shoes once again, but the damn vocals start to get more than annoying around this time. They’re trying to sound sexy, but the nasal quality mixed with the voice treatments begin to wear thin fast. “Drive” rectifies this somewhat by slowing down the vocoder and creating a sort of Parliament-Funkadelic-meets-New-Wave groove. It’s the kind of thing you might see that goofball Vin Diesel tooling around to in one of his flicks.

By this time it’s the middle of the album and Peplab has pretty much done it all. They can only go downhill or spin their wheels from here. They do a bit of both. “Saturdays” is the kind of slow electronic thing that any of the remnants of N’Sync might throw onto one of their solo projects. “Mr. Psychorock” regurgitates the electro-disco stance once more, while “Big Time” seems like “Pornstar, Part Two”.

In small doses, Peplab and Drive can certainly make for a big groovy time. Over the course of an entire album, however, it all begins to play the same. It’s the exact same thing that plagues a lot of bands of this ilk. They have one cool formula and nowhere to expand it. Still, it’ll be interesting to see what happens to Peplab and where their music will take them. It’s not the worst thing currently out there by a long shot, but it certainly could have used some tweaking in the lab before it was released to the world. Perhaps an EP might suit them better next time around.