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Club kid ilk everywhere put on those jukin’ shoes because Simian Mobile Disco just announced their US tour dates (after the jump) in the fall to promote their second studio album Temporary Pleausure out now on Wichita Recordings. This is a follow up to 2007’s Attack Decay Sustain Release. Producers Jas Shaw and James Ford of SMD recruited a pantheon of indie stars including Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip, Telepathe, and Chris Keating of Yeasayer giving vocals to Temporary Pleasure‘s first single, “Audacity of Huge”. Recorded in the band’s East London studio, Temporary Pleasure is an album filled with minimalist house beats and robotic vocal distortion of imperative lore. Unlike the heavy-hitting pump up the volume, pump up the volume, dance! of Justice or the Bloody Beetroots, TP stealthily slithers into your cerebrum.
The band recently forayed into the avant-garde fusion of technology and aesthetics called “augmented reality” or AR. Conceived by Kate Moross and produced by MagicSymbol, an installation celebrating the release of Temporary Pleasure featured a mixture of both real life and computer generated images all within the SMD cosmos, creating the illusion that virtual things thrive in the corporeal realm. It’s that art imitating life or life imitating art shtick. Those clever synth-cats.
This ambitious, visual evolution for SMD would translate impeccably to their live show, seizure-inducing lightning fest and all. Pyrotechnics aside, SMD live if done the AR way could be a new kind of ecstatic chaos for the concert-going experience, minus the need of drugs. SMD have already expanded their alignment with the AR endimanche’, by having Kate Moross also direct their music video for “Audacity of Huge”.
As an extension of SMD’s said affinities, “Audacity of Huge” is abound with striking, juxtaposed tableaus of things you’d find off the cover of your old EyeWitness books and convex close ups that make you ask, “What is this, really? or “How does it relate to anything?”, reminiscent of Conan O’Brien’s old Late Night skit “Patterns” where we see a few incongruous pictures, only for them to be united by a more-often-than-not grotesque punch line. Nothing super yucky here, thankfully. There’s also a lot of viscous liquids. Honey? Maple syrup? Maybe molasses? Look out for the boys of SMD at the end of the video making a cameo appearance in what appears to be a limited edition set of UNO cards. I guess that illusionary motif finally comes full circle, huh? Still pretty cool though. Be sure to catch SMD kick off their tour of the States on October 28th in Boston, but for now here’s the video for “Audacity of Huge” and a trippy visual performance of “Synthesise”, full of flashy geometrics:
TOUR DATES
Oct 28th Boston, MA @ Paradise
Oct 30th New York, NY @ Webster Hall
Oct 31st Philadelphia, PA @ Starlight Ballroom
Nov 1st Washington, D.C @ 9:30 Club
Nov 4th Chicago, IL @ Metro
Nov 6th Toronto, ON @ The Mod Club
Nov 7th Montreal, QC @ SAT
Nov 25th Los Angeles, CA @ Mayan Theatre
Nov 27th San Francisco, CA @ Mezzanine
Nov 28th Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom
