I don’t think critics have ever been thrown a bone quite like the title of Daedelus’ sixth full-length, Exquisite Corpse. The catch-all name describes a slough of dorm-lounge games wherein different players riff off one another’s phrases and/or images to construct something grotesque, hilarious, and unrecognizable. The most famous version is probably the folded tripartite head, torso, and legs. It’s a great game for many a tipsy Thursday night, and I like to think Daedelus has just as much fun constructing his music. He’s got a great thing going for him, a tickly mix of vintage strings, squelchy oscillators, jazz-drum gobbets, and dance-funk basslines that make you actually want to pop it in for strangers. In his best work, he shifts weight between these different elements quickly enough to thrill and exhaust, and a lot of us have been preparing emotional space for a masterpiece since we first heard him.
Thing about that game — Exquisite Corpse — is that when it gets late, people aren’t jumping at the chance to contribute, and a few of the pieces are just, you know, chicken legs or something. Starts to seem less like creation than bland nostalgia. That’s how I felt when I first heard “Order of the Golden Dawn” off his latest release, Righteous Fists of Harmony, which sports the sort of easy-listening bossa nova guitar line that Astrud Gilberto wore out decades ago. Daedelus’ wife, Laura Darling(ton) returns to contribute vocals that, no longer vocodered to hell, actually evoke an airbrushed Laetitia Sadier; Darling lets the melody divvy up the syllables of the word “righteousness” which is sooo ’Lab. The song’s alright, I guess, but it takes some weird imported idea of Daedelus’ humor not to hear the flute flourishes as New-Agey. This is a recurring plea: the ridiculous two-octave gap between the layered vocals on “Stampede Me” are terribly annoying if they aren’t an amazing joke. “Fin de Siècle” is so close to an old film score that it could be found art — unlike its reference point, “Dreamt of Drowning” off Demise, which continually melted down the pitch.
In other words, this is all stuff that Daedelus has bait-and-switched in and out of his music for a punchline before, but he’s never let it lie so bare. Gone are the spastic drums, and for the first time it seems like a stretch to really refer to cut-and-paste. Dude’s just not restless. To be fair, some great stuff surfaces: the second half of “An Armada Approaches” could be cut from an earlier album; there’s a great ominous squiggle that keeps creeping up throughout “Dawn”; “Stampede” is punctuated and saved by cannonball drums; there’s still plenty of glorious fuzz. It’s still Daedelus, just a little older, a little more content. If that makes us, the listeners, less so, well, Daedelus still absolutely owns our discomfort. If he could learn to channel that, he’d be the musical equivalent of Wes Anderson, but right now the joke isn’t on anyone.
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