Album Review: Cellar Door by Idjut Boys

The recent resurgence in Balearic pop music is a contender for the most innocuous trend redux of 2012. Forthcoming efforts from mainstays like Mungolian Jetset, Woolfy vs. Projections, and Windsurf exhibit an enthusiasm for the sound even though the spotlight has turned elsewhere. Newcomers Poolside prove that outsiders haven't lost interest, even if their debut album mostly just remind us of the halcyon days of 2007-08 when both Air France and Studio were going concerns.

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This is the Idjut Boys' first album. Seriously. They ain't exactly been idle over the years, but that still seems hard to fathom. With output spanning almost 20 years of dance music, the duo—Dan Tyler and Connie McConnell—have been Beardo Renaissance men of a sort, between assorted twelves, edits, an album with Rune Lindbaek as two-thirds of the Meanderthals in 2009 and a series of high-profile mixes perhaps topped by their Press Play set for Tirk in 2005.For Cellar Door, the Idjuts return to Smalltown Supersound, the home of their album as Meanderthals, and, as they've mentioned in interviews, set out to make the kind of double-sided LP you can savor over morning coffee; savor, flip, return to your waffles to revel in side two.

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Idjut Boys, the London duo of Dan Tyler and Conrad McDonnell, have been movers and shakers among the more fashionably nonconformist wings of the dance music world for well on two decades -- as producers and label heads, but perhaps most notably as disc jockeys -- but they had never, exactly, made a full-length album prior to 2012. At least, that's what they contend, although it seems like splitting some of the finer hairs of release taxonomy (apparently, 1998's Noid Full Length, and their multiple LPs under the Phantom Slasher moniker, don't qualify for the designation because they included previously released material, and 1999's Life: The Shoeing You Deserve, perhaps, because it was a collaborative effort with Quakerman). In any case, Cellar Door, named for/with what some allege to be the most beautiful phrase in the English language, definitely makes good on the euphonious promise of its title, if not entirely on the duo's waggish disco-not-disco reputation.

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