The sound
Junior Senior’s debut album, D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat, explodes in your face like an H-bomb of outrageous dance punk. Junior (Jesper Mortensen) sings, writes most of the songs and plays instruments on this delicious smorgasbord of candy-coated hooks and samples. Senior (Jeppe Laursen) sings, claps his hands and brings the infectious, feel-good vibes. Through the album, juicy dance floor grooves are spliced together with glammy guitars, funk choruses, garage rock flourishes and a veritable cornucopia of other elements. And grooves are just what these boys cook up: the tracks aren’t so much traditional dance songs as odd scraps of hip-hop and disco funk dressed up in nouveau production with instrumentation that harkens back to classic ’60s power pop. Think of what may happen if the Avalanches ever decide to pick up instruments and record original material, and you’d be somewhere close to the bombast of D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat. The song titles betray their obsession with movement and motion (‘Rhythm Bandits,’ ‘Move Your Feet,’ ‘Shake Your Coconuts’), and they all deliver the goods. These Danish boys (brought to you by the Raveonettes’ original label) act as the logical heirs to the B-52s, another flamboyant band that understood the importance of throwing equal parts retro influences and ass-shaking hooks into dance tracks (and the album’s opener, ‘Go Junior, Go Senior,’ demonstrates a genius, ‘Rock Lobster’-esque use of bassline). ‘Boy Meets Girl’ delivers a vintage, Some Girls-era Stones guitar riff, while ‘Move Your Feet,’ the first single, features the dead-ringer Michael Jackson vocals of Thomas Troelsen (of the Danish band The Superheroes).
The look
Taking fashion cues from Rainbow Brite, these trend-savvy Danes mix technicolor ’80s pieces (Izod-esque shirts, wristbands, visors) with undersized, vintage cool. Junior sports meaty, retrolicious mutton chops that would make any Village Person’s mouth water; Senior resembles a scenester version of John Belushi. D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat also acts as the ideal backdrop for showing off some fabulous retro dance moves, a la the fruge, the watusi and general shimmying. Extra points are awarded for the most eye-popping CD cover art to grace music stores in some time.
The attitude
The infectious, dance-’til-you-drop D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat is the kind of album that should be cranked up around sunrise to inject life into a sagging party. Experimenting with glam punk ethos and down ‘n’ dirty disco beats, Junior Senior also spends much of the album expounding on the politics of polysexuality. The duo continually announces that Junior likes girls, while Senior digs boys. For a guaranteed good time, check out ‘Chicks and Dicks,’ a hand-clapping, foot-stomping smash and the greatest ode to sexual confusion since Blur’s ‘Boys and Girls.’
Why they matter now
Junior Senior provides an extremely important service that not many other bands would approach they make dance music fun, hip, smart and, most importantly, listenable to outside of a club. These wacky Danes work overtime to get music lovers of all shapes and sizes on the dance floor and shaking their asses. While Junior Senior displays enough garage flare and trend awareness for fashionistas to want to eat up their brand of ear candy, they’ve got the musical smarts to reach a wider audiences than a bunch of jean-jacketed hipsters quietly ‘doing the electroclash’ (keep your eyes open for that indie wiseass intensely pumping one leg). In this day and age of washed-out, overblown alterna-crap and unoriginal, overproduced pop trash, Junior Senior iswilling to provide a musical facelift for that ancient institution known as the radio and teach an important, age-old lesson: music should make you want to dance.