A sense of humor will pull a dance album through a lot a lot a lot of lulls, but it won’t save it in its entirety. If ever a band, actually Armand Van Helden and A-Trak, names you know very well, right?, were saved by their sense of the riculous Duck Sauce were. It made the very wonderful “Barbra Streisand” froma couple of years ago not just an addictive hooked hailed as a dance pop move, but the Babs voice made you smile while it did.
“First there was the word and the word was Duck…” Every couple of years Duck Sauce have released a song and finally here is the end result. A full fledged album of duck jokes and quacks, weird samples and, er. crank phone calls. And it stars as big time funs and then just gets annoying. The odd thing here is Duck Sauce were right, they were right to dole out their Daft Punk meets, well A Trak and Armand, a house dance party as advertised, in small doses. Long before you reach the theoretically excellent penultimate “Spandex” you wish they’d just think up another joke.
Take any song out of Quack out of context and it will work as pretty fun dance, many of these racks were fun singles, but when you sit and listen it as an album you their jokiness because smugness, and they don’t seem able to pull out a variation on it. The songs are all modern kitchen sink sound machines, all electric saws and synths that sound like engines.
From the awesome opening quacks, the album is fun but as Woody Allen once asked, how much can you laugh? It interrupts the beats to make a joke and the jokes can get, frankly, somewhat infantile.
This isn’t a bad album but I wouldn’t mind hearing the two DJs get together and play it straighter down the line. Or just keep releasing the occasional single
Grade: B-
