Review - Walter Meego: Voyager

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Walter Meego

Voyager

Sony/Almost Gold Records

It was a small but terrifically important triumph over pretense for me to add Britney Spears’ “Toxic” to my iTunes library, to be able to acknowledge the occasional rewarding radio gem, and to not judge it by the company it keeps. For the stodgy, inveterate critic to find artistic merit in the unabashedly derivative takes an uncommon alchemy indeed: pop music, from a critical standpoint, is under constant pressure to justify its theft. Regrettably, self-proclaimed “experimental pop” duo Walter Meego have artlessly pilfered Daft Punk’s bag of floor-filler tricks and the Cardigans’ pretty-chimes-over-snarling-basslines aesthetic and combined them into a whole woefully inferior to its parts.

“But Aziz, pop music steals from dance music all the time. Madonna has made a career of regurgitating two-year-old dance trends as pop hits. Why bring the hammer down here?”

A brief assertion concerning an admittedly nebulous genre-concept: Good Pop reconstitutes its influences (be they dance, metal, etc.) in an externally rewarding, accessible way. To that end, hardly anything on Voyager points beyond the music it pillages.

Worse yet: that Walter Meego would call their album Voyager is the wrong kind of funny. The album bites any number of filters, money-synths, and guitar accents from the Daft Punk track of the same name (among others). Even if the gesture was meant as tribute, it amounts to artistic suicide: explicitly referencing prior greatness while never leaving its shadow is a tidy way of ensuring that everyone recognizes your irrelevance. Don’t expect an iota of redemption in their poetry: the bulk of it is hastily scrawled, monosyllabic throwaway. “Girls” is, lyrically speaking, completely unlistenable, with vocalist Justin Sconza’s affected accent conjuring a clubbed-about-the-head Lily Allen, bereft of any Allen’s quirky frankness.

Among the few interesting moments on the album, “Keyhole” opens with a reverb-soaked barroom piano and an unexpected 2-step shuffle (instead of Yet Another Thoughtless House Groove). The song’s build and keening vocals convey tension in an unprecedented way. After a well-placed breakdown, we’re treated to maybe the first impolite squeal of sincere feedback we’ve heard yet.

O, but! With redemption at hand, the band unloads yet another bullet into its metaphorical foot as they clumsily stuff the solo from Daft Punk’s “Aerodynamic” into their coat and stroll nonchalantly towards the door. I wish I were kidding.

The next track, “Lost”, while not without its merits, serves to illustrate that, when Walter Meego aren’t openly aping Daft Punk, they’re still not straying any further than their source material did. George Clinton’s huge, rounded basslines haven’t seen a day’s rest since Dre built G-Funk on their muscle over 15 years ago. Between West Coast Rap and the death and rebirth of French House, at this point, they might be among the most bankrupt, inbred ideas in pop.

Really, the album isn’t uniformly bad: it’s clear the band has labored over the mix of each track, filling them to saturation with twerps, sparkles, and other bits of ear candy. Part of the problem is that the album’s good ideas are spread thinly throughout 43 minutes of music and drenched in overproduction like so much ketchup. As opener and single “Forever” swooshes into its chorus, it’s frighteningly easy to picture an expensive-looking Target ad accompanying it (yep: I’m calling it now). As its keyboard solo struggles for affect, one comes to the uncomfortable realization that this, too, is lifted from a Daft Punk song (“Digital Love”). While it is not without them, the album’s gems are buried amidst insufferable bloat, and the search isn’t a rewarding one.

Mostly on the merits of its darker middle third, Voyager is an acceptable, enjoyable few songs, provided you ignore the rest of the album, don’t speak English, and politely forget about Daft Punk. It’ll get stuck in your head, sure as it was crafted to do, but you’ll immediately resent its presence: it’s already worn out its welcome. Whether or not you’ve even been aware of Walter Meego, the moment you hear “Forever”, you’ll know you’ve heard it before.

-Aziz Khan