Birdy Nam Nam
French DJ crew Birdy Nam Nam might’ve broken out long after the initial ’90s establishment of turntablism as its own novel take on DJ culture; if you’ve heard of them before, it’s probably thanks to a very 2010s co-sign from none other than Skrillex and a subsequent appearance on A$AP Rocky’s “Wild for the Night.” But back in 2005, when trendhoppers were more infatuated with seamless mash-ups than complex turntablist routines, Birdy Nam Nam’s self-titled debut built off their tight DJ-crew interplay to create an album where it felt like every last bit of turntablism’s percussive qualities was put to work building a new form of ensemble music. Each member gets a specific “instrument” to work with for each track — one works the rhythms, others tweak assorted melodies — and while the styles they screw around in might be familiar, they lean into the uncanny side of things. The lounge-jazz goof “Kind of Laid Back” has all the tongue-in-cheek chirpiness of a parody — complete with an interlude featuring the sound of someone taking a piss — but its silliness is at least somewhat offset by its ingenuity in the way it sneakily resembles an actual jazz combo, only to deliberately let some of the cut-and-scratch seams show for emphasis. Their music takes advantage of its unreal-seeming loop-grafting structure to add some heightened strangeness to already-weird sounds: the suspenseful nerviness outweighs any kitsch in the VHS thriller score tropes of “Escape,” the squelching synths of “Too Much Skunk Tonight” combine the analog queasiness of Quentin Dupieux’s recordings as Mr. Oizo with a high-impact low-end that makes your stomach lurch, and the uptempo tension of late-album highlight “Abbesses” soaks in a roiling slow-boil that evokes a ruminative strain of post-rock but pulls it taut enough to let its rhythms sink in deep. And sometimes it gets really moody — the sludgy, vertigo-inducing atmospherics of “Il y a un cauchemard dans mon placard” makes for a sinister dark-side-of-acid-jazz exploration worthy of Amon Tobin.