Bonde Do Role With Lasers

Throw a stone in Shoreditch these days and you're likely to hit a baile funk DJ. Throw a brick and you've got a decent chance of at least maiming one. Diplo's Favela On Blast introduced funk carioca (also known as favela/baile funk) to a wider audience back in 2004, and Bonde Do Role's sample-heavy Melo Do Tobaco EP (on his Mad Decent label) provided an accessible entry point for the uninitiated indie kid.

Initially inspired by Miami Bass 12"s, funk carioca follows a format instantly recognisable to anyone with even a passing interest in hip hop: lyrics are generally concerned with bigging up your favela (i.e. slum), baiting the police and with graphic sexual imagery, and until recently the Baile experience generally involved being shot or stabbed at some point during the fun. Bonde Do Role have been described as a safe, middle-class variant on the theme, and the very fact that Domino, home of all manner of worthy mewling/abstract guitar plunking, have chosen to release it might well provide someone with grist for a boring blog entry, should they have nothing better to do.

MCs Pedro D'Eyrot and Marina Vello (along with DJ/MC Rodrigo Gorky), eschew the violent undercurrent associated with the genre, preferring to concentrate on Beavis and Butthead-style filthmongering on subjects such as indiscriminate sex (Tieta) and a gay James Bond (James Bonde). Works in progress include a song about queefing (look it up), complete with a fart breakdown, and so it's safe to say that you won't be taken on any sort of deep musical journey by listening to their debut album.

Whereas their first 12" was built around blatant, cheeky, Western-friendly samples of Alice in Chains, The Darkness and the Grease soundtrack, the twelve two-minute shots of raucous energy that make up With Lasers are less reliant on novelty; Radioclit, DJ Chernobyl and Diplo have been enlisted on production, with the latter contributing to the most radio-friendly track (Solta O Frango, currently inspiring seizures among Nokia-using party types according to recent ads). Another early highlight is the aforementioned James Bonde, wherein guitars shred and chug under Marina's sing-song MCing to suitably scummy effect. Diplo also has a hand in the album's highlight, Gasolina, although the speed with which the tracks are dispatched means that there's hardly time to even evaluate a track's worthiness before you're bundled on to the next.

Like many hip-hop albums (well, at least those that resist the temptation to throw an I Need Love into the mix), With Lasers is one-paced, one-dimensional party music, which is far from an insult; it sounds like bottled youth in all its dumb, body-slamming, saliva-swapping glory, with little thought given to longevity or substance. The result is an album that has the emotional depth of a firework display, and while it seems unlikely that they'll enjoy a long and varied career, criticising the album on those grounds is as ridiculous as berating a one-night-stand for not wanting to marry you. The feeling is predominately that Bonde Do Role, like The Ramones or Rick Rubin-era Beastie Boys before them, just don't think about things that seriously, and neither should you.