REPO is the fifth album by Black Dice. The Brooklyn, NY-based trio has never worked harder at crafting a set of concise, sonically battering, or flat-out bizarre tunes than on this collection of fringe-surfing tone bombs. Yet a new roadhouse blues-band philosophy has simultaneously emerged, allowing the group to loosen up and toss off a record packed with blurry hooks and zoomed-in riffs as casually as a grizzled denizen of roadside dives might spew out aural alchemy in-between a few brews.
Brothers Eric and Bjorn Copeland and Aaron Warren have spent the better part of 10 years in daily contact, touring the world over, and sculpting their saw-toothed sound balloons under circumstances most reasonable people would wretch at. The resultant hive mind occupied by the three is an inevitable consequence of so much shared experience, both musical and simply day-to-day. Their communal consciousness is as packed with garbage as much as it is concerned with making catchy tunes, and often the songs pouring out of it contain equal parts bombastic infectious rhythm and chaotic detritus.
REPO is the sound of a disciplined group of cosmic jokers setting out to reclaim the landscape popular culture would have us believe we cannot afford. The record irreverently mulches the sounds and images of radio, TV and internet into a fertile compost pile squirming with new, raw life.