The Dare – ‘What’s Wrong With New York?’ review: an effective if uninventive throwback

6 September, 2024

The Dare, pictured in a suit and sunglasses amongst garbage bags, photo by Richard Kern

“I think my teeth are falling out,” The Dare sings on the woozy electro ballad ‘Elevation’, “Like in a dream of mine.” The 20-something New Yorker goes on to admit he’s so heartsick that he hasn’t “slept for days”. Luckily, there’s a solution of sorts at hand. When the chips and down and love takes its leave, you can always slip on your “dark sunglasses”, get mashed and head to the club.

It’s far from a new revelation, but that’s sort of the point. The Dare – aka California-born Harrison Patrick Smith – has been described as the poster boy for the so-called ‘indie sleaze revival’, a nebulous and largely online movement that fetishises the mid-’00s. Here was a time of digital cameras that captured a hundred disastrous photos from one blurry night out. Shots were a quid, your jeans were so tight they were in danger of crushing your Blackberry and no-one’s songs were empowering or about reshaping the narrative. There were a lot of songs about getting mashed and heading to the club, though.

So The Dare is nostalgia, pure and simple, from a musician born just too late to have pulled a stranger in a regie nightclub while a DJ in a V-neck tee played the Spank Rock remix of CSS’ ‘Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above’. His debut album, ‘What’s Wrong With New York?’, trades on deliberately tinny beats, womping bass, shards of dissonant guitar and lashings of cowbell. He regularly shrieks and yelps as if he’s just signed a deal with DFA Records. If that sounds familiar, you must have heard an LCD Soundsystem song at some point in the last 22 years. He even wears a natty black suit like James Murphy.

It’s tempting to tell Smith that Murphy wants his shtick back (along with his suit), but the pastiche is often effective, at least. His defiantly dumb breakthrough track ‘Girls’ is one of the best singles of 2006 and ‘Movement’ builds to a crunching, multi-layered cacophony that demonstrates greater musical sophistication than he’s often given credit for. The latter point could also be made of ‘All Night’, an irresistible mix of gang-chant vocals and featherweight keys. On comedown closer ‘You Can Never Go Home’, meanwhile, he cops to his limitations and influences with refreshing self-awareness: “Sometimes I only play one note / Sometimes I steal what others wrote.”

Still, there’s something a little depressing about music that’s this nakedly backwards-facing. Beneath the hedonism, anxiety thrums through ‘What’s Wrong with New York?’ – hence, perhaps, Smith’s dream of his teeth falling out – and he’s clearly captured a wish to return to a time before Covid, before fake news, before bots and pile-ons and information overload. But you’d be better off just listening to LCD.