Chin Chin

Back before music came packaged to us in mp3 files, vinyl records, or even Edison wax cylinders, music was the sort of thing you could only enjoy in social settings. Back in the pre-recording days, hearing music meant one of two things: either your town was about to be overrun by an advancing army as rich in drums and fifes as guns and knives; or more happily, there was a party goin’ on. It is in this latter spirit that Chin Chin has released their debut, self-titled album. Their complex twist on funk and disco is like a really good eggs las migas - the ingredients are familiar enough, but spiced just unusually enough so that surprises lurk in every other bite. Chin Chin has created an intricate, weird, and occasionally excellent album whose only major shortcoming lies in the fact that it is actually an album and not, in fact, a party filled with other sweaty, dancing people.

A keyboardist and a couple of multi-instrumentalists make up the core of Chin Chin, though the guest list of percussionists and brass-men take up the majority of the spare liner notes included with the album. The tracks tend to reflect this set-up - a central groove, like a community bicycle, is taken turns on by the vocalists and soloists (there are usually at least two) before guests hijack and joyride, and eventually disassemble the thing. Whether they’re aping Steely Dan, as in lounge-chic opener “Miami”, or creating anthems for ’80s criminals on “Curtis,” the results tend to be enjoyable. What the songs lack in melodic catchiness, they generally compensate for with tightness and unpredictability. And the unrestrained, silly fun oozing out of tracks like “Toot D’Amore” makes you willing to forgive sleepers like “Step by Step”, a closer which sounds like it was wisely axed from a poorly augured Pink Floyd/Os Mutantes collaboration album in the ’60s.

Still, despite the chant-worthy hooks and the well-placed accents, the album might not drive anyone into uncontrollable fits of booty-shaking. The lyrics, with a few exceptions, are eminently forgettable, and the impressive vocal range of the band goes to waste on songs where vocal melodies are plagued by repetition and insufficient dynamism. “Appetite”, for instance, has all the components of a great Prince song except that it doesn’t tell a story; it settles for repeating one lackluster paragraph for its whole four-and-a-half minutes.

Chin Chin claims to have gotten its start playing a monthly party, and cut its teeth on high-energy live shows. I’m surprised, therefore, that the tracks which shine the brightest are probably the least feasible live–the band’s secret weapon in the studio is a sublimely bizarre vocoder. This is not the hackneyed, pointless self-sampling of T-Pain; when Chin Chin rolls out its electronic voice-effect, it’s like they’ve added a new, robotic member to the band. Somehow, the paranoid, olfactory images of songs like “Donchusee” cohere into something legitimately scary when sung by a robot, and the repeated, multilingual greetings on “Ohio” take on a first-contact-with- aliens feel when they get this treatment. Even a potentially inelegant song about sexual performance anxiety is saved when it becomes a man-machine duet; there’s something inscrutably adorable about a robot chalking up his premature climax to “psychological malfunction.”

Despite the weak spots on the album, though, even the weaker tracks here would set a party ablaze. After all, not many people go to a live show to listen carefully to lyrics. A good live band can get away with disconnected phrases about white gloves and doing the foxtrot, but those sorts of endearing, quirky lyrics can lose a lot of their magic on a studio record. Still, I’ll be first in line to catch these guys the next time they’re in town, and I’ll be looking to see if the next album more accurately translates the barnburner vibe onto musical end-product.

June 5, 2008