What is it with Bergen, Norway anyway? Kings of Convenience, Röyksopp, Magnet, and Sondra Lerche (just to name a few) all hail from its rainy streets, and now you can add the eclectic Datarock to that ever-growing list. Datarock is the duo of Fredrik Saroea and Ketil Mosnes, who take a kind of Dadaist approach to their music and rarely do anything even remotely obvious. Mixing and matching is the name of the game on their self-titled full-length debut where lo-fi, indie-pop, disco, electronic, post-punk and hardcore all peacefully co-exist on one album. Whether it be the Joy Division-inspired “Bulldozer,” the slinky Depeche Mode stylings of “I Used To Dance With My Daddy” or the indie-rock of the duo’s entertaining and hooky ode to performance artist Laurie Anderson on “Laurie” (sample lyric: “I wanna be Lou Reed/because I wanna make her say Ooo Ooo Oh yeah c'mon baby c’mon, alright!”) Datarock never fails to deliver something memorable, hooky, and fun.
--Mark Horan
