Haxsaw and Dugin - Girlfriend

By: Joel Frieders

I gather so much new music on a daily basis that I'm constantly fighting the battle of keeping who gave me what straight. Most of the time I'll unzip everything and create a playlist with 7-15 albums from a single day's downloads and title the playlist by date. If something doesn't hit me the first time through I normally delete it from the day's playlist and then when I have one or two albums left in the dated playlist, I listen to those a bit more closely. Then I write about what I love the fucking Fuck out of.

An EP that I received last month, and which isn't slated to drop until fucking August of 2012, is titled Girlfriend and is from self-described Wave Punk Computer Music makers Haxsaw and Dugin. Sure, you have to wait a few more months to get a digital grip on this shit, but from what I've been inserting into my holes lately, it'll be worth the wait.

Girlfriend is fucking straaaange bro bro. Haxsaw and Dugin sort of sound like a Depeche Mode-y, Cowboy Junkies on codeine if the Cowboy Junkies actually fit as perfectly in your brain as they do in mine. It's delicate and humorous and weird, but I can say with absolute certainty that the first track I listened to, All Alone, is electro fucking perfection. Trading syncopative synths with open air drums and a talk-sung vocal, it's glitches and fuzzes do nothing without the plucked east indian string synth providing the thrust on this fucking bag of dicks.

Haxsaw and Dugin, while creating their own genre classification, take their sweet time on this album, and while I'm not one to sit through a two minute build up, I'd like to think some of these fucking songs have actually made me a better person. As funny as that sounds, when the vocals finally hit on Living In This Room, it's fucking glorious. Seriously, fucking balls deep, head noddy, smile to yourself in public and receive weird looks, lean your head back on the headrest, scratch your balls in slow motion, fucking awesome.

Novembr I Can't Remember is another one of those tracks that starts off slow, but evolves into this snowfall in the summer type all-consuming demonstrations of beautiful ass motherfucking Wave Punk. Laced with acoustic guitars, dainty minimal glitchy glitchy drum drums, sad-british-ish vocals, it's a walk through a forest that's more hologram than instagram, and it's fucking sweeeeeet.

While, yes, I think some of these songs are too fucking long, I can see each of them being cut in half by speeding them up and throwing some house beats under the muthafuckers. If the intention of Haxsaw and Dugin was making something ultra relaxing so as to ingrain the shit in our heads, and THEN put some fucking thrust behind it, well, good shit. If it wasn't and they're just into fucking sitting around and waiting for the song to tell them when to get moving, well, that's good shit too.

Regardless, me likey aloty.