Artist: Danja Atari
Title: At the Back of Beyond she found an Artichoke
Genre: Trip Hop
Release Date: 27th May 2011
Label: Z-Muzik
Album Review
DANJA ATARI is a spin off project from TENGU BASEMENT. DANJA ATARI is a Berliner who also counts her heritage from France and Tunisia. Hers is a mixture of trip hop, drum’n’bass and electro, which pleads to span culturally diverse experiences of a world traveller. Unfortunately from the start her vocal made an impression of some more advanced Barbie girl songs. Now not all of the music is by any means bad, it sounds fresh, invigorating and lively, and could very easily find fans on the dance scene, but her voice in combination with this just gets irritatingly plastic, and not exactly fantastic. Switching from singing to rapping, from French to spoken word, just doesn’t change this until ‘Broken Shed’ which shows that in a different style of music, the texture of her voice would come out more... grown up.
It’s still sugary enough to give you a glimpse of what’s it like to have a complex partial diabetic seizure though. The ending of the song swerves back to its usual territory. Next song is back to Barbie & Ken adventure. Literally, male vocal (of SOLA PLEXUS) no less annoying enters as well. There’s a lot of interesting points regarding sounds, the beats, if you forget the richly chewing gum pink super-girly hue of DANJA ATARI’s voice, the changing of techniques is quite quirky and welcome, some parts even seem humorous. ‘Soeurette’ was a song that I enjoyed the most, very chanson-like, reminiscent of PORTISHEAD in a very small degree, and DANJA ATARI has shown once again (but even more so) that her voice in combination with a different music wouldn’t come out so grating on nerves.
The ending as if reciting a poem or a memoir was also very nice touch. It’s quite a beautiful song and one shinning out of the album as a real gem. It also adds an extra layer to make the emotive landscape of the album a little bit more complex and varied. Next up are the bonus tracks, a remix of Cache-Cache that has some nice atmospheric additions that certainly make this song better than its Club Version at the beginning. The ending remix of Get out is the opposite, the Album version was by miles the better one. For fans of this style of music it will seem as a breath of fresh air indeed. For those willing to give it a listen, it’s interesting enough to do so, but I doubt it’s something to replay more than once or twice at max.
Tracklist
01. 97 – 3.38
02. Get Out (Album Version) – 2.46
03. Cache-Cache (Club Version) – 4.24
04. Sans Ailes – 3.55
05. Trying Goodbye – 3.16
06. Broken Shed – 2.34
07. Golden Shoes feat. Sola Plexus – 2.50
08. Something – 4.03
09. La Vie Est Belle – 3.20
10. Soeurette – 4.13
11. Bonus: Cache-Cache (MadGreen Remix) – 5.19
12. Bonus: Get out (Egotronic Rock’n’Roll Remix) – 3.11
Line-up
Danja Atari
Websites
http://www.danja-atari.com / www.myspace.com/danjaatari
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 6.5
Sound: 8
Total: 7.25 / 10
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