Well, it just goes to show you can’t win ’em all. Much has been made, over here at least, of the fact that Prinzhorn Dance School are the first British band to be signed to James Murphy’s DFA label. What hasn’t been made so much of is that they are proof of the LCD Soundsystem man’s human fallibility, because they’re not very good.
On paper, PDS sound like a great idea – a spiky, low-fat three-piece cranking out dancefloor stompers using punk’s crude electric arsenal. Sadly, on a stereo they sound like Bis. Their songs consist, almost exclusively, of short and often painfully ironic slogans chanted at random intervals over a cacophonous racket. It’s not necessarily bad to be a one-trick pony – ask Mark E Smith – but you’d expect that pony to have a more impressive trick than, say, eating hay.
If Prinzhorn Dance School were a fictional band – poignantly illustrating the effects of radioactive mutation on the arts in ‘Threads’ perhaps – they’d be great. Sadly, without an apocalyptic narrative to contextualise their existence, they’re just annoying. The likes of Victorian English Gentlemens Club do this sort of thing so much better, and we’d advise you to investigate them instead, or hang on for DFA’s next release, from New Zealand’s Shocking Pinks, which should restore Murphy’s indomitable reputation.
