Les Twins

Les Twins is not the usual type of musical act for Mr. D's Music Reviews. In fact, you may not even call them a musical act at all. They don't play instruments. They don't sing. They don't even make beats. But Les Twins and music are like three peas in a pod.

 Les Twins is a poppin, lockin, spinin, slidin, glidin, groovin, movin, dance duo from France. They are the youngest of 18 siblings and the 3rd set of twins in the family, but with all the shadows and footprints that they must have grown up in, they are all but the overlooked babies of the family. They might just be the best dancers in the world.

They are identical twins standing at 6 feet 3 inches with stylish clothes, poofy Afros and moves that make your ankles hurt just watching them. Larry and Laurant are their names, and they are difficult to tell apart at first glance, but once you've watched them as many times as I have, you begin to see that Larry (Ca Blaze) does the fancy foot work. He twitches and glitches so quickly and with such precision that it sometimes looks like the video must be sped up, but it ain't!  His signature move, among many others, is getting all robotic on one foot. You'll know it when you see it.

Laurent (Lil Beast) is the wiggly man. His moves take him to the ground and back again. In videos, Larry seems to dance more. In the following video, the majority of the dancing is done by Larry, but in dance battles, Laurent's style seems to be a mighty secret weapon because the other guys just can't do what he can. But don't take my word for it. Check out this compilation of Les Twins dance videos. Some are low quality recordings, but the moves are sick. At 3:10, you can see Laurent's signature move that puts the nail in the dance coffin during a dance battle at France's Juste Debout in 2011. They won, btw.

The style is called New Style. They incorporate moves from Pop N' Lock, B-boy, Liquid, Tutting, Glitch, and whatever you call that moonwalky style that Michael Jackson made famous. 

They also took World of Dance by storm in the 2012. Here's a weird performance from that show:

Chad Vangaalen

Chad Vangaalen:

Boasting seemingly senseless lyrics, contagious melodies, excellent one-liners and a complete lack of respect for the music industry standard of rock ’n roll, Chad Vangaalen deftly defies mediocrity, and blazes new trails into the relatively uncharted jungles of indi-licious, folk-tronica.

Vangaalen’s new offering, Skelliconnection is tacked up on the Subpop wall along with the early 90s giant Nirvana, who busted the scene open in its own day and passed the torch down the line to Vangaalen who continues the arduous task of breaking music’s jaw and reshaping its face one album at a time. The new record starts more on the electronic, toy box-rock side of things with Flower Gardens and Burn 2 Ash, but Red Hot Drops comes along early on with a mellow groove and melody Viking Rainbow and Dandruff.  By the time See-Through-Skin’s harmonica/computerized keyboard lead is over you’re pretty sure that if Bob Dylan ever dies and comes back as a robot, he’ll sound a lot like that. The fun and games continues with Wind Driving Dogs and Mini T.V.’s, but from the outset of Sing Me 2 Sleep, you know Vangaalen is up to something new. This time, he’s cooking up a beautiful, well composed acoustic tune that gives you everything you could hope for in such a song, proving that after all the unusual music and strange lyrics, Chad Vangaalen really just loves you, and he wants you to be happy.

that send you to the space-out zone. He hits a stride with the one-liner brilliance of this track, and you never want it to end, but like all good things, it’s gone before you know it. From this point on, the CD delves into a country, rocky, folksy spot punctuated every now and then with indescribable electro-noise ditties,

Myspace.com/chadvangaalen

The Fall of Troy (album review)

Fall of Troy: Manipulator

            If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? More importantly, if a Troy falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it rock the crap out of everything else in the forest? Yes. Every so often, a maniacal jam-tastic band comes along that simply overdoes everything; the Fall of Troy is that band. Their licks are tight and nothing short of insane, their breakdowns are exhaustive, erratic and epileptic, and with a tongue-in-cheek take on metal, emo, and jamming, they rattle from one end of the rock spectrum to the other, all the while sounding like well organized noise. I’m just waiting for the Fall of Troy energy drink to hit stores.

            FOT’s Manipulator album is a mile-a-minute junk-a-thon speckled with exquisite vocal melodies in tracks like The Dark Trail, Oh! The Casino!?, and Semi-Fiction. Just when you think you’re about to hear a somewhat radio-friendly song, FOT ruins those dreams with an unnecessarily sporadic mega breakdown with maddening drum, bass and guitar riffs that defy logic and send a simple message to the mainstream: [explicative deleted] that! After A Man a Plan a Canal Panama, if you can still think straight that is, you’ll realize that FOT is in the world because sometimes you just need to scream, fling your head around, go completely deaf and have your face melted off. If there were any mystery before, rest assured, Manipulator is the disk that launched a thousand ships. (look it up)

It's a little grainy, but it's just as crazy at it should be.