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The Soft Pink Truth: Do You Want New Wave Credit Drew Daniel for imagination if nothing else. Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth? (the title a variation on a Minutemen song) finds the Matmos member exhuming the corpses of nine 1970s and 1980s hardcore classics and clothing them in electro disco garb. Joined by an impressive cast of collaborators, Daniel breathes new life into tunes by legendary punk acts like Minor Threat, The Swell Maps, Die and Kreuzen. Ample oppositions abound: English punk rock vs. American hardcore, apolitical dance mentality vs. rebellious punk nihilism, impassioned alienation of the originals vs. ironic reconfiguration of the covers, guitar roar of the former vs. glitch abstractions of the latter, and so on. The interpretations can be read as earnest and/or farcical but Daniel likely wouldn't want it any other way; eschewing fixed meanings is par for the ideological course. One does, however, presume a spirit of genuine affection in his song choices; dedicating the project to the Louiseville hardcore scene circa 1985-89 certainly smacks of sincerity. Unlike the house-flavoured Do You Party?, Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth? includes singing on virtually every track, with Daniel lending his own voice to many. His glam vocal appears atop a sparse array of handclap clatter, roller-rink organ, and rollicking pots'n'pans beats in the opener “Kitchen,” while People Like Us's Vicki Bennett robotically pleas for revolt on Crass's “Do They Owe Us A Living?”; adopting a recitative style, Bennett issues a scathing indictment of decaying social systems alongside Daniel's pinballing tech-house beats. Blevin Blectum duets with Daniel on the seedy funk romp “I Owe It To the Girls,” written by Teddy & The Frat Girls, while, boosted by elastically jacking beats, Dani Siciliano strays far afield her Likes… material with the profane rhymes of Minor Threat's “Out of Step.” Elsewhere, though, the project falters, not because of a lack of ideas or imagination but because of musical mediocrity. The Die Kreuzen cover “In School” is a pointless and fleeting exercise in digital splicing, as is the brief coda “Lookin' Back,” a camp treatment of an old Broadway show tune originally crooned by Carol Channing. Rudimentary Peni's “Media Friend/Vampire State Building” adds Jeremy Scott's shredded vocal to splatter-disco beats but the song amounts to little more than an unmemorable jam. And far from shocking, the lyrical content of Nervous Gender's “Confession” (featuring a drooling vocodered turn by Martin Schmidt) and The Angry Samoans' “Homo-Sexual” sounds just as calculated as it must have the first time around and ultimately comes across as tedious. That Daniel resists taking himself too seriously is refreshing; at the same time, doing so affords a convenient way to avoid the more daunting challenge of creating work of greater depth. Matmos's A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure, for example, came close to hitting that mark by catalyzing the group's powers of invention and imagination into a near-perfect statement that balanced irreverence and seriousness. Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth?, though, fails to make good on the considerable promise of Daniel's solo debut Do You Party? Would that the project impressed as much musically as it does conceptually. December 2004
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