Somewhere in the fashion industry, some smart people around a conference table are determining what’s getting produced next season: barrel-leg jeans out, giant jorts in, whatever. As far as I know they don’t do this in the underground pop scene, but if you need a guy, call CFCF’s Michael Silver, who is standing ready to give a just-back-in-fashion sound a bespoke makeover. In 2015 and 2019 it was new-age electronica, and in 2021 the Y2K-inspired cult classic Memoryland. On L.U.V., supposedly short for Life in Ultra Violet, the longtime electronic musician performs a similarly reverential refurbishment on some of the strobe-lit dance pop of the 2000s and early 2010s, combing through references for an extra-juicy, secretly super-sincere take on the sound of skinny-stripe tees and Risky Business sunglasses.
L.U.V. takes the fundamental subject of most pop music (love), plays up the irony factor with songs technically about hot babes, cocaine, sex, and disillusionment (sleaze in an objective sense), then doubles back and suffuses it in genuine love for the sounds of Alan Braxe and Fred Falke’s celestial synth risers, Fischerspooner arpeggios, Basement Jaxx’s guppy-fish grooves, Daft Punk’s robot talkbox funk, and Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” One could malign the style as a tacky remake of sleeker, sexier disco and techno inspirations, or as being predictably goofy and obvious. In a tradition of absurd, overqualified deep cuts, L.U.V. songs launder their outwardly uncultured fascinations into dirty jokes. “I love noise music/And I love to read Dostoevsky/But what I really love the most/Is fucking,” quips Estratosfera of Argentinian club duo EQ on “ultra-obscene!”
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In the album’s big pop song, “Bad Song,” the real toxic relationship is the self-loathing associated with loving purportedly “bad” music. “What’s a girl to do when nothing hits like the dumb shit?” asks featured vocalist Cecile Believe, a question I ask myself, like, every week. “Put it on a loop.” Breaking one taste taboo affords space to break another, and then you can call your track “Let’s Kill Ourselves.” In a radical remake, Silver lifts part of a song by Chicago indie-rock band the Ponys (a “not so subtly self-effacing opener,” according to 2004 Pitchfork) and, with Touching Ice, turns it into a dance-punk waterslide featuring TECHG1RLS’ sarcastically vocal-fried character dialog, full of hyperbole (“Paris is so beautiful, it makes me want to kill myself”) and humor (“I’m staying for a third and last drink, and then I’m killing myself”). The 2004 version sounded like the Rolling Stones, but the new one sounds like Avenue D and is, in a way, even more 2004 now.
You could say L.U.V. is CFCF’s first and only pop album, but with such obvious care and attention to detail, the music never feels like commodity product. The self-aware recreations are catnip for the pop-art fan who recognizes it’s all been done before and wants to do some more right away: Are you ready to give “Fuck me at Comic Con/Fuck you at Dunkin’ Donuts” a place in your lexicon? Does that melody have a little bit of Tiga’s “You Gonna Want Me” in it? Does the extended comedown on 10-minute closer “Love Hotel” (must have been a long night) remind you of one of those classic sad Hot Chip ballads? Does the French-touch-hits-the-club sound of this album ever make you think of French DJ Martin Solevig (signature track: “Hello”), who worked on the best songs on Madonna’s 2012 EDM album MDNA, working title L.U.V.? This is the loopy, fan’s-fan fun of CFCF’s L.U.V., and there’s only one “Bad Song” on it.
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