RIFF MARKET

Today's guest riffer, Rob Dubbin writes for the Emmy-nominated Colbert Report and improv-comedizes around New York City as part of Dwayne's Guest House. Previously he was the lead singer and guitarist of the Cambridge-based art-rock quartet Forced Premise, whose 2003 debut The Rat-Faced Bastard EP was made into an art-rockomedy theatrical production, also called Forced Premise. Here Rob weighs in on Erlend Øye and the Whitest Boy Alive's forthcoming Dreams LP.

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The Whitest Boy Alive: "Inflation (Album Version)"
The Whitest Boy Alive: "Fireworks"

Just because I didn't know until someone told me, this is a band fronted by convenience monarch and best-ever DJ Kicks curator Erlend Øye. If you knew that, awesome. If not, pretty exciting, right? I'll wait for you to go and start your torrent download.

The album cut of "Inflation" threw me because these guys more or less covered their own song. It was released as a single back in 2005, when it had the synth-pop appeal of 2003's Unrest but also the good sense to venture into new territory. So you can imagine my surprise when I heard the album version, all drumsticks and drum sets and guitars with actual strings on them.

Both versions are pretty great, is the thing. And while I would have loved to hear an album full of stuff that sounded like the original "Inflation," the fact of the matter is that me being me, I'm pretty much going to love anything that has Erlend Øye singing over it. He's in the same club as Neko Case and Jens Lekman, the one where everyone has a captivating voice and they charge a reasonable $1 for diet cokes from the soda gun. It's one of my favorite clubs, second only to the one for people who make 45-minute songs.

In terms of how it fits into the rest of Dreams, the revamped "Inflation" kicks off a nearly unstoppable 3-4-5 combo. #4 is "Fireworks" and it's the one that will get stuck in your head, #5 is "Done With You" and it's the one where you can hear the drumbeat about ten measures before it actually starts. So, to put this in terms we can all understand, it's the close-range hadoken that opens your opponent up for a fierce punch and a throw during the recoil.

Shouldn't people be making a bigger deal out of this record? I thought all of Erlend's various projects had enough collective cachet that this one would get at least a smattering of overpromotion and hype. I mean the guy's penetrated enough that the DJ at my office Christmas party felt fine playing his kicks comp straight through as if it were her own set. Not that I was going to call her out, which would have ruined my self-enjoyment of being the only one who noticed. All I'm saying is you'd think there'd be more momentum behind a guy with Erlend's combination of credibility and relative obscurity.

After all, Dreams solves this time-honored problem: Two people are getting married, and they loooooooooove microhouse. Still, they'd prefer live music at the reception--they hate those get-on-your-feet dancers that wedding DJs always bring along. I know basically nothing about microhouse, and yet I'm prepared to declare Whitest Boy Alive the world's first microhouse cover band. If Erlend takes offense to that label, and one assumes that he will, I'm sure the couple could find a suitable microhouse cover band tribute band. It's probably called Powder.

89/100 RIFFS