e-mail reminder

There are few artists making seriously great music while not taking themselves too seriously: that difficult feat is one rarely attempted and even less often successfully carried out. Benoit & Sergio have seemingly effortlessly managed to pull off that contradictory trick, producing songs that sometimes seem like musical open letters: editorials narrated in the voices of unidentified, yet totally recognizable colorful characters, read aloud against a backdrop of beautifully lush, warm and sensuous electronic pop music. The unexpected juxtaposition of such pristine production and playful lyricism — first exhibited on 2009s highly praised What Ive Lost EP, which included the brilliantly sardonic single >Full Grown Man< – exemplifies why Benoit & Sergio are one of the most unique and interesting outfits in dance music. Its good news, then, that the Washington, D.C./Berlin-based outfits eagerly expected DFA debut maintains both the charm and expert craftsmanship of its predecessors. Single >Boy Trouble< (the titular counterpoint to >Full Grown Man<) launches the EP with all manner of reasons to take to the dancefloor: An exigent beat, a beckoning synthline, a bassline of understated funk. Sergio lethargically sings about girls, making note of both their ups and the downsides, without the hindrance of subtlety. >I love girls/With legs like a Ferrari< he states before noting (bemoaning?) the fact that >You need poetry to turn these girls on.< Its a song for the best part of the night, full of compulsive rhythms and a climax that builds on sparkly synths. The accompanying remix from Visionquest — the Detroit-bred, Berlin-based label led by producers Seth Troxler, Ryan Crosson, Lee Curtiss and Shaun Reeves — amps things up, making the beat a more prominent, driving and club banging force. The flipside features >Full Grown Man< and >What Ive Lost<, which reveal themselves to be worth more than a few revisits.