Offbeat, off-kilter, and for the most part off their rockers, Swiss tandem Larytta are making trouble in the best of ways. The phrases ‘degenerate-rock,’ ‘ESLectro,’ and ‘exchange-student afro-pop’ readily come to mind. For an electronic head locked in the basement, this is an uncomfortable breath of fresh air, goose bump material that leaves you looking back over your shoulder to see if someone is watching. Taking the impossibility out of contradiction, Difficult Fun is the best of tests. Like your calculus teacher handing out a problem set of brain-teasers and optical illusions, Larytta challenges you to take a leap outside of comfy confines and expand your notion of what music-making is and can be.
A kaleidoscopic range of styles crammed into a 13-track easy-to-swallow capsule, Difficult Fun manages to teeter between depression, hilarity, confusion, and hope. Not to mention they make dope-ass beats. Lyrically, Christian Pahud & Guy Meldem have amassed a trippy testimony of trials and (mostly) tribs, ups and (mostly) downs. With lyrical gems like “You should really see a doctor/ Yeah I know it’s on my mind” (“Bauch Amp”) and “I know seven languages/ I know the capitals of every country/ But where is the money?” (“The Money”), the duo uses the album to talk each other through erratic fits of scatter-brained malady. The voices themselves represent contrasting hemispheres of the mental — one side, a hard, monotone splotch of drab grey attempting to break through its imposed sedation; the other, a soft saccharine seduction that isn’t afraid to hit the painful high notes. Conversely, if one were to tune-out the actual words, the album would read like a pop scrapbook, pieced together by ethnomusicologists who got their hands on a rusty MPC.
Both clean and gritty, subdued and erratic, plain and edgy, Larytta find a way to be what you want of them, all the while never quite becoming the people they themselves want to be. On “Is This Cheese?,” muttered vocals mingle with scuttling bass blasts that would easily ascend the rungs of the pop chart if they weren’t so odd in their infectiousness. Elsewhere, tracks like “Ya-Ya-Ya” and “Voodoo Things” bang Konono No. 1 congotronic lo-fidelity below monosyllabic tribal chants, grunts, and toots. “Spoiled Kids” finds the twisted Swiss’ters tweaking dance floor 4x4 rhythms with stuttered synth stabs and vocal snippets that refuse to quit.
There is an insatiable thirst tracing through the narrative of Difficult Fun. Larytta never actually finds the hose, but if they did, a water fight would likely ensue before any quenching was accomplished.
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