mixtape maestro (2.0)

If we had to pick one track we were most excited about from Discovery‘s long-awaited debut, aside from recently realized addiction “So Insane”, it would have to be the album’s proposed cover of Jackson 5′s “I Want You Back”.

It’s no secret how much we adore cover songs around here, and it should be stated that we geek off crazy over anything Jackson-related (hell, we give Rebbie Jackson’s underappreciated hit, the MJ-assisted “Centipede”, at least one good spin a week), so yeah…the idea of this definitely excited us.

Then we actually listened to it.

Now, don’t get us wrong, not all of Discovery’s remake effort is tragic as there’s a certain delight in the sound of “I Want You Back”‘s familiar bassline slowly moving to the forefront in the intro, followed by an exciting explosion of shimmery electro-pop noise around the :30 mark. But shortly after that arrives the beginnings of this strangled, computerized croon and instantly, it’s like someone pierced our joy balloon with a rusty shank.

We understand how difficult it might be in grown men perfectly replicating the bright chops of a young Michael Jackson, but couldn’t the Auto-Tune/ vocoder effects (or whatever the hell was used here) been passed over just this once?

We’re still Discovery fans, but we have to give this one a low grade just because it let us down so hard.

DL: “I Want You Back (Jackson 5 Cover)” (alt)

A year ago this time we were hyping Discovery’s “Orange Shirt”, a blurry indie-pop-meets-crunk summertime confection that could best be summed up as nerdy White boys concocting their own “Love In This Club”. The introductory single and succeeding leak “Osaka Loop Line” were both compelling enough to jumpstart our intrigue for what else the duo (made up of Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot’s Wes Miles) could produce, but that turned out to be so long of a wait, the guys had kinda fell off our radar.

This week, Discovery premiered a couple more songs via their website to tease the release of their July 6th/ 7th-set self-titled debut and instantly, our curious anticipation for the band has been reignited.

The one track that’s got us the most excited would have to be “So Insane”, a quite “insane” tune that fiddles around with a slew of different tempos as numerous punchy drum machine attacks inspire us to pull off our best Janet Jackson circa-Rhythm Nation 1814 choreographed dance breaks. Helping tie the manic beat together: a dreamy vocal about catching teen romance at the local discotheque and it’s lovable grasping of all the stomach-tingling feelings that puppy love creates (“Ooh baby you’ve got me going/ So insane/ And I just don’t know what’s goin’ down…”).