Strange Weather, Isn't It?
- !!! [Chik Chik Chik]
- Band Name: !!! [Chik Chik Chik]
- Record Label: Warp
- Release Date: Aug 24, 2010
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82The group still moves within the same sphere as LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture, but if you're not fed up with indie-electronic-dance-rock just yet, !!! is still among the best in the hybrid genre.
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80Brief though it is, 'Strange Weather, Isn't It?' represents a remarkable sharpening of focus at a time of flux - and possibly crisis - for the band.
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Strange Weather may get some static for not being groundbreaking or risk taking but that's okay. It's just !!! at their best and that's good enough.
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80It's practically a soundtrack for pool parties, clubs, and makeshift living room dance sessions. The album knows exactly what it wants to do, and accomplishes it with grace.
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80A song like AM/FM is downright uplifting, catchy and groove-heavy which, along with bucking our expectations, is always what lifted this eight-member band above the fray.
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80Ten-plus years and four records later, their raw, post-punk-colored-funk attack still sounds as compelling as it did at the start.
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80Such uplift from dread makes Strange Weather a fitting party record for our age when so many American Dreams, lived and fantasized, are falling apart. Pass the bottle.
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With 2007's Myth Takes, the ecstatic dance-punk collective !!! came up with an album almost as strong as its best singles and live shows. The group largely holds that stride with its fourth LP, Strange Weather, Isn't It?, a nine-song, 40-minute set that functions as a celebration of rhythm, movement, and macking.
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Strange Weather, Isn't It? is not life-altering fare, but the album's 40 minutes of club-approved funk-rock signals another noteworthy entry in the band's discography.
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Strange Weather, Isn't It? returns as a more disciplined, ziggurat kind of groove odyssey, where the modular sounds are rhombus and the emotional undercurrents darker and more demure.
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70It's as if Offer, completely understandably, has pulled everything towards him a little too close. Reined everything in and hugged the songs a little too tightly.
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What's great about Strange Weather, Isn't It? is that it offers enough diversity to save you from making you own mastermix. [Sep 2010, p.108]
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Strange Weather, Isn't It? is undoubtedly the band's most streamlined effort to date.
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While the frequent use of echo and the isolation of each instrument lend the record a spare quality, Strange Weather, Isn't It? is hardly akin to Bowie and Eno's emotionally stark Berlin Trilogy. Instead, the album sounds like a band trying to regain its footing by returning to its fundamentals.
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69Strange Weather, Isn't It?: you'll enjoy it plenty while it's on, but once it's over you might forget it ever existed.
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This time !!! remembered to bring the party, but they forgot the favors that fans have come to expect--grooves that make the body explode into dance spasms. [Summer 2010, p.76]
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These layered, multi-directional numbers stand out rather than fit in. On either side are tunes a little too straightforward, big ideas a little too self-contained to really mesh in the way you want them to.
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60US party band !!!'s fourth is a holiday record, full of movement and heat and things that feel tired and cheesy at home, but are good, sleazy fun when you're away. [Sep 2010, p.98]
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60The group's fourth, recorded in Berlin, pulls a few new shapes but a lack of any truly transcendent moments suggests a group destined to remain middleweights. [Sep 2010, p.83]
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60Berlin's long-running tendency toward grit-glitz, which musicians from Bowie to Peaches have channeled in their work, is the inspiration for this fourth record of functional fun.
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60This is a collection of grooves rather than songs, but there's depth. [Sept. 2010, p. 113]
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60The sonic expansion is admirable, but perhaps a trip to Miami--instead of Berlin, where some of Weather was recorded--might've been a better atmospheric adjustment.
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They're going through the motions, you can't get into it, and then it's over, just like that. Strange Weather, Isn't It? is a party where everyone looks like they're having fun.
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50There's nothing on their fourth album that couldn't have been recorded in the early to mid-1980s. [Sep 2010, p.50]
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Simply put, Strange Weather, Isn't It? is beat for the sake of beat. !!! has certainly mastered the means of dance-rock, but they haven't mastered the ends.
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40Strange Weather is like a middling dance mix; its 10 tracks merging into a puddle of differing shades of grey that happens to have a kicking heartbeat.
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