With his early Tigerbeat6 missives, Topher LaFata — Gold Chains, motherfucker — made
with sound that almost exploded out of the speakers: a bass-heavy, heavily-distorted,
lo-fidelity polyglot of dancehall, hip-hop, and underground-electro, all topped
off with his gruff, guttural vocals. Like a rappin' counter to Miguel Trost-Depedro's
mischievous laptop-rockin' monkey Kid606, Gold Chains was a musical riot going
on; his two T6 EPs lent him enough cachet to hook up a PIAS deal and take his
shtick to the masses; his crossover debut longplayer, Young Miss America, offered
a broadside critique of American consumerist materialism (viewed through the
prism of hip-hop) to go with a set of songs whose cleaned-up tone tempered the
aggressiveness of his early forays. For his latest longplayer, LaFata has retreated
into the indie underground, When the World Was Our Friend coming out
on iconic imprint Kill Rock Stars (which, whilst initially seeming a curious
union, b'comes less so when you recall that KRS were behind Har Mar Superstar's
debut). A shared collaboration with long-time collaborateur Sue Cie (AKA video-artist
Sue Costabile, who's also worked with longtime GC alum Kit Clayton, and new-GC-friend
German electro-songstress AGF, AKA Antye Grere-Fuchs), the disc is basically
a more straight electro-pop variation on the Gold Chains angle. Where previous
production jobs by Clayton drew from dub and dancehall, here the disc is produced
by micro-house hero Vladislav Delay, who polishes up the audio palette and shines
proceedings to a sleek electro sheen. The bombast, bravura, and belligerence
that defined LaFata's T6 days have vanished, too, replaced by a more demure delivery
to match electro-pop's beloved deadpan façade of cool. When When the
World Was Our Friend does break from this form, it does so not to evoke LaFata's
hard-ravin' salad days, nor to dial up the aggression of modernist hip-hop production,
but to go strangely "rock." The most singular depiction of this comes with "Runaway," whose
leading-the-mix drums and reverb-drenched sleigh bells initially appear to be
an exuberant homage to the girl-group productions of Phil Spector before a harmony-laden
outro acclaims, outright, Spector's Beach Boys work as the inspiration. With
this influence coming, then, not from "Then He Kissed Me," but "Then I Kissed
Her," this song comes close to "borrowing" the riff from both.
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