- Half folksy, half electronic Swedish duo jj might not belong to the dance music community per se, but they certainly operate from the synth pop margins. Like fellow Scandinavian popsters The Tough Alliance, Rebecca & Fiona, ceo or Air France, they bring a synthetic edge to their neo-Balearica poses, a sound the Sincerely Yours label have come to epitomize in recent years. That said, on "Ecstasy," a song featured on their first album, they also incorporated elements of a Lil Wayne track, indicating that band members Elin Kastlander and Joakim Benon also had a thing for mainstream American hip-hop.
Kills, a free "mixtape" offered around Christmas on their label's website, pushes the duo's hip-hop leanings to the fore. The result is pretty much unlike anything you've heard, blurring the line between the so-called mixtape format and the very idea of originality. "Still," built around a simplistic piano loop taken from Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg's late '90s hit "Still D.R.E.," isn't that far away from jj's former serene material. But on "Kill You," M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" is panned left and right in the mix and then twisted into an abyssal ambient piece while Kastlander alternates between teenage confessions (how about "I wanna die so I get high" for overdramatic silliness?) and lyrics lifted from "Paper Planes" itself. This is producing, sampling, mixing (in the DJ sense) and remixing all at once. It's also really, really fun.
Elsewhere, the likes of 2Pac, Kanye West, and T-Pain are invited to intertwine with Kastlander's diaphanous, mostly Autotune-enhanced murmurs. Yet, having her exhort everyone to "get fucked up" and declaring "fuck all you hos" makes for something both ironic and postmodern indeed. Even as jj are producing-while-listening, though, they're also frenetically making their favorite tracks their own, a process that is both relatable and universal. This is showcased to perfection on "New York," a subdued take on Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' preposterously anthemic "Empire State of Mind." Here the delusion of grandeur of its original performers is replaced by a frosty yet more humane interpretation. The same treatment is applied to "Pressure is a Privilege," a pounding go at Dr. Dre and Jay-Z's recent "Under Pressure." It's not DJing in the classical sense, but at the same time you can also hear the influences of 2 Many DJs and Girl Talk in the way the duo defines its relationship to the material at hands.
There are also the occasional nods to Swedish culture: "Die Tonight" mixes lyrical excerpts from Robyn's "Hang with Me" over a melody lifted from Tiao Cruz's "Dynamite" (seriously), and "Believe" makes overbearing use of digital effects, TLC-like spoken-word moments and old school R&B rhythmic patterns as it incorporates a discreet sample of ABBA's "Lay All Your Love On Me." With inventive cuts like these, Kastlander and Benon come across as true semionauts as they explore the various signs emerging from the unavoidable omnipresence of the Anglo-American Top 40 and the way it dialogues with various locales and peripheral cultures.
The end result of this ongoing tension is an accessible yet intriguing—and frankly quite exhilarating at times—example of Situationnist-like detournement that reconciles the global and the local while turning the darkest corners of the Scandinavian psyche into an imaginary ghetto in which hos and drug dealers run with folk troubadours and pot smokers on melting glaciers. In other words, Kills is a truly unique proposition that formally falls halfway between cover songs and freestyle karaoke, and it does so without jj ever losing the intricate sense of self they have carefully crafted so far.
Tracklist01. Still
02. Die Tonight
03. Kill Them
04. Kill You
05. New Work
06. Believe
07. Pressure is a Privilege
08. Angels
09. Boom
10. High End