Dislocation Dance

I glossed over Dislocation Dance when I wrote about Diagram Brothers, almost two years ago, by noting they shared Andy Diagram as a founding member. A grave mistake!



As you can tell, the Mancunians cultivated a strain of new wave that followed in the footsteps of city-slicker jazz and 60s French yé-yé pop more than the mythological post-punk lodestar, the Sex Pistols. Accordingly, I'm inclined to frame them as a forebearer of Stereolab, the High Llamas, maybe even Yo La Tengo. And then there's a palpable AM-radio soft-rock pulse, one that brings to mind Everything but the Girl and Prefab Sprout, bands that privately worshipped the likes of Burt Bacharach. Hard to believe they were formed in the late 70s.


The elegantly spare production and brightly eclectic sensibility, made especially so with the application of dinky early-80s synths, makes it impossible to deny a connection to Japanese bands that emerged not long after, namely Pizzicato Five. In fact, if I was told some of this was produced by Haruomi Hosono (細野 晴臣) for his Non-Standard label, I'd believe it. There's a shared DNA that makes the contemporaneous existence of these guys, Mikado, P5 seem like more than coincidence.