Daphni - Joli Mai

Daphni
Joli Mai
2017
Spotify

In the upper echelons of dance music names, groups and genres can get a bit wiggly. Daphni, also Caribou and also San Snaith. With Daphni Snaith focuses wholly on dance music where with Caribou it is much more indie centered. You'll find Daphni pop up with people like Four Tet, Floating Points and others of that ilk usually plying their trade behind the decks. Things start interestingly enough with "Poly" a sort of hard to hang on to banger but the shifts into a straight bassline and vocal track with "Face to Face". "Face to Face" sticks out like a sore thumb as one of the most dated tracks. I understand where it is coming from trying to evoke the most basic of dance music, but it's overly long and never reaches a true point. The shift into "Carry On" is then a very abrupt one suddenly thrown into an entirely different headspace. The album sort of works as a big DJ set in some places but that flow is also often interrupted despite the occasional shout out you can almost hear from the booth. This is a very DJ centered record even though Daphni produced all the tracks himself. "Vulture" is actually where we get into my problem with techno: it takes so damn to get to the fucking point! he reaches so great conclusions and the journey there is not all that bad, but i don't think we need three full minutes of the same thing over and over on an album cut. An album is not the DJ booth and people are going to experience this music differently. Trying to recreate the time you have to explore live on an album just never works, and it doesn't work here even though it is so damn close. You have to be a realy house and techno head to truly appreciate this stuff.

There are times where he does lock into something like on "Tin", but once he finds a nice groove he keeps pushing to find something else which can cause a bit of a jumble. He is so TECHNO-cal (see what i did there) sometimes that he looses the emotion of the track. You want to feel that release and He sometimes gives it to you like on "The Truth" which has a clear beginning middle and end but other times you are left wandering the dance floor alone. At just over an hour the record isn't super long winded but listening to it without the context of a dancefloor is challenging. The album seems so drenched in club culture, not the usual poppin bottles kind of shit but the more refined club goer who is there to see the DJ rather than be seen themselves. You just wish the record hit a bit more, made bigger statement like on "Hey Drum" where He creates this incredible build only to waste it on something that allows the track to fade into obscurity. "Medellin" is similar in that it is so one note throughout that you keep checking back to make sure you are still listening to the same damn song. There is a lot to like about this record but also quite a bit that will honestly bore you. That unevenness makes it hard to recommend the whole thing.

6.7 out of 10