TOPS form precious balances. They create emotionally powerful sonic experiences with a contemporary understanding of the classic song structures that have guided pop music since the beginning.
A close listen will reveal their assurance as musicians, but their experience derives from playing in warehouse lofts rather than going to school. There is a place for each note in their songs. Complexity disappears behind a veil of familiarity.
The four members of TOPS wander through pop music’s capacious past and, though comparisons can be made to yesterday, no clear lineage to a single influence can be drawn.
Tops | Rings of Saturn
httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=w-m2y_wFbiQ
Their broad musical vocabulary places them somewhere alongside contemporary bands who, taking the best aspects of pop music and the organic approach that comes from playing together, makes something that sounds fresh; distilling influences into something that is innovative in the present moment.
Dan Bodan is the newest member of the ever-brilliant DFA-family, being referred to by DFA themselves as their “heartthrob.” It appears that he’s from Germany and has been making music for quite some time now.
Dan Bodan | Aaron
httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=DD8OvPC-Fhw
Writing from a rent controlled apartment in Berlin, Dan Bodan’s songs are the afterbirth of weekends of raving and missed opportunities. If the songs aren’t post-internet, they’re definitely post-empire, and a lot of them post-breakup.
Touchy Mob is the plenty-limbed, vulnerable love affair of a hauntingly warm guitar song and the body language of beats, that are meant for a floor.
Touchy Mob | Of Leading Cheer
httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=fMfI4fDJBC8
It’s a long-term marriage to the lyrical intensity and comforting darkness of songwriters like Chad VanGaalen, yet with a heavy crush on the riffs of the rave, throwing in found-sound stuff like The Books do, laying a kiss on the kraut history here and there, but in Four Tet marching time.
Songs grow on instant glances of admiration instead of continuous influence, scratching along towards punchlines, that can be entirely different in sound yet cohesive in general aesthetic or mood, not a dense mass, but a mass to get lost in.
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Tops, Dan Bodan & Touchy Mob LIVE
presented by Shameless/Limitless & Noisekölln
Saturday, 03 November 2012 | 22:00 CET
Freudenreich | Sonnenallee 67 | 12045 Berlin/Neukölln
tops.bandcamp.com | soundcloud.com/dan-bodan | touchymob.com
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