ARE Weapons Return

If you can remember way, way back to the good ol' days of music...you know 2003...you might remember that ARE Weapons were quite a big deal. Hot on the heels of the electroclash explosion, ARE Weapons were tipped by everyone to be the next big thing but by 2004 they had pretty much faded into the obscure New York rat hole they had crawled out of. Undeterred, the band continued to churn out three albums and fly under the radar. Seven years or so later, they are back once again and the Weapons are back with a vengeance; their fourth album Darker Blue, is a slice of No Wave that's so informed by Suicide that Alan Vega somehow stumbled into being part of the band.

Noisy, raw, and uncompromising Darker Blue is the sound of synthesizers being stripped to an inch of their existence and then used until they explode in a fiery ball of destruction. ARE Weapons are brash, electro punks that literally abuse their instruments with the sole purpose of destroying them in the name of some sort of perverted rockabilly version of synth pop. Darker Blue is crazy and angry stuff that takes New York City's attitude and crams it into nine compact songs designed to beat the living heck out of you. This might be electronic music, but you get the sense that the last thing ARE Weapons have in mind is a shuffle around the dance floor. Rather than being all glittery and glitzy, the Weapons get grimy and greasy and use their synths, sequencers, and samplers as battle axes to create a drunken robotic rampage that sounds like the Cramps on acid.

Darker Blue is fantastic stuff that's a non-stop blur of synthetic beats, drugged out vocals and an overwhelming feeling that the world just might end sometime during the playing of this album. In an age where electro is over commercialized and so over ground that even your grandmother knows who Hot Chip is, it's nice to know that a band like ARE Weapons are around to take it back to the street and rough electronica up a bit. If you like punk and secretly love synth pop then ARE Weapons have been customized for your tastes. Darker Blue is an urgent modern punk rock record and when the band sing "Street Justice," and "Don't You Die On Me," you kind of know that the Weapons are either going to kill or be killed for the music that they love.