>>PREVIEW
CSS
Wednesday, August 2
Hifi Club
When one thinks of Sub Pop in its current incarnation, the first images that spring to mind are most likely modest mice, a parade of wolves or a certain Calgarian with an infinite heart. Nonetheless, the Seattle label recently made its first South American signing –an electroclash band at that. CSS, or Cansei De Ser Sexy, translates in Portuguese to a phrase once uttered by Beyonce Knowles. In English they’re "tired of being sexy," but in any language the group seems silly, sensational and like a non-stop party.
Made up of five brown-haired babes and one handlebar-sporting hunk, the Sao Paulo six-piece simply seem excited to be heard outside of their native Brazil. "We've been together for almost three years now," says guitarist and harmonica player Ana Rezende. "We didn't even want to be a band, release albums and stuff like that at first. It was more just for fun to meet friends. We picked people that would be fun to have a band with, not who could play well or anything like that. We like to dance a lot, and we like to make music that people can dance to." The group's self-titled debut certainly is danceable, with a sound reminiscent of M.I.A. or Le Tigre, minus the politics. Underneath a wall of synthesizers, sound-effects and delightfully simple guitar hooks, vocalist Lovefoxxx spits sexually charged lyrics that seem similarly tossed off. Yet, despite the band's obvious difficulties with the English language, her urgings for listeners to "lick my art tit, suck my art hole" on the album highlight "Art Bitch" are meant to be taken as tongue-in-cheek (pun unabashedly intended). "That song is about people who take themselves too seriously," explains Rezende. "In anything related to art, it's just so boring when people take themselves very seriously, and think that they're doing something very meaningful to the world. We don't like to take ourselves very seriously, and we don't want to be another boring, pretentious band.
"If you listen to us talking to each other every day, we talk like that. If you're trying to shock someone, then you're taking yourself too seriously as well. That's not what we do at all, but people nowadays are much more conservative. I hope we don't shock people."
As self-admitted Internet geeks, another area that the band is interested in is North American pop culture. This is especially apparent on tracks like "Meeting Paris Hilton" ("she was rich and famous and I didn't know why") and the hilariously earnest first single, "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above." "We wrote that song because Lovefoxxx is the number one Death From Above fan ever," laughs Rezende. "She really wanted them to know about us, so she was like 'I did a song with Death From Above in the title, so when they Google themselves, they will know about us.'" "In the video there's a scene where we kind of offer some reference with the elephant (gas) masks, so we had to let them know to ask them some authorization to use them. Fortunately, they said yes, but I don't know if they've heard the song yet." In the end, despite their obsessions with the Vancouver two-piece and vapid hotel heiress, the members of CSS simply seem excited to have the opportunity to tour as a group. "The thing that inspires us the most is us being together," says Rezende. "Because we're a group of friends, that's very nice. All of the lyrics we do are based on what we talk about, so that's the biggest influence, more than music itself." |
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