D. I. Go Pop is the second studio album by English post-rock band Disco Inferno, released on 28 February 1994. After forming as a post-punk band in 1989, the band subsequently worked towards an innovative production approach that incorporated found sound elements through extensive use of digital samplers. The band released several critically acclaimed EPs in this vein from 1992–93, and recorded D. I. Go Pop concurrently with some of those preceding EPs, working with producer Charlie McIntosh. The album cover, designed by Fuel and featuring photography by David Spero, has been described as "one of the most indelible album cover images in the '90s."
The album was released by Rough Trade Records in the United Kingdom and by Bar/None Records in the United States. It did not chart and was mostly overlooked on release, bar some positive reviews. However, it has since gone on to be considered an innovative and influential album and a key release in the history of post-rock. Numerous bands have cited it as an influence. It has been featured in several lists of the greatest albums of the 1990s and of all time. The album was remastered and re-released by One Little Indian Records in March 2004, bringing the album renewed attention from both critics and music buyers.
Background Disco Inferno formed in 1989 in Essex by teenagers Ian Crause (guitars and vocals), Paul Willmott (bass), Daniel Gish (keyboards) and Rob Whatley (drums), although Gish soon quit the band to join Bark Psychosis, leaving Disco Inferno to become a trio. They were initially a post-punk band heavily influenced by bands such as Joy Division and Wire, releasing their first album Open Doors, Closed Windows (1991) alongside the "Entertainment"/"Arc in Round" single, also from 1991, and 1992's Science EP, all of which were compiled onto the compilation In Debt (1992). However, Crause soon became infatuated with the unique sounds of bands My Bloody Valentine and the Young Gods, as well as the Bomb Squad's revolutionary production and sampling on the music of Public Enemy, and with the release of the Summer's Last Sound EP, released later on in 1992, the band's musical style shifted towards sample-based electronic sounds. The band "hit upon a seemingly simple but ultimately world-opening idea" with the EP: to write their instruments through samplers, and unlike their contemporaries who only sampled elements of music, film dialogue or other media, Disco Inferno "engaged with the whole world", using their set up to record additional sounds as well, ranging from running water, the wind, whistling birds, boots, car crashes and angry voices. Crause had purchased a Roland S-750 sampler with his savings and started programming towards the band's sound for six months. In a 2011 interview, Wilmott recalled of the era:
Summer's Last Sound was praised for its uncompromising, innovative and experimental sound, and the group expanded the approach with their subsequent EPs A Rock to Cling To (July 1993) and The Last Dance (November 1993), both of which were released on Rough Trade Records after their previous label Cheree closed. According to Andy Kellman of AllMusic, the new label "saved the band's life, as the members believed that they were too challenging for anyone else to understand or care for." Kellman commented that, "disorienting, confusing, and highly schizophrenic, the challenging releases were in direct contrast to the prevailing Britpop scene of the time," taking "A.R. Kane's futurist pop a couple steps further and secured a devout and small following that found solace in their wildly imaginative, peerless nature." The band became characterized as one of the first post-rock bands.
Recording The band began work on their second studio album concurrently with some of the band's later EPs in 1993. However, despite the critical success of the band's EPs, the band had not been commercially successful. A journalist at The Quietus recalled that "the sparse tiny-numbered disconnection of DI's audience, the rarity of finding anyone else who understood just how great they were, became disheartening," despite the praises of the band written by David Stubbs, Taylor Parkes, Lucy Cage, Jon Selzer and Simon Price in the British music press. Crause recalled, "I remember our manager once telling us we had enough good reviews to wallpaper our houses with but we needed to pay our bills. It did start to become apparent in the last year or so that the reviews, especially in Melody Maker, counted for absolutely nothing in sales terms, which I belatedly came to realise were the be all and end all of being in a band if we needed to survive."
As such, the band recorded D. I. Go Pop under Crause's increasing tension, working with producer Charlie McIntosh, seeking to continue the evolution of the band's sample-based sound. Although the time between writing and recording was usually very short for the band, not leaving "much time to fully evolve each cycle," the writing and recording of D. I. Go Pop was the longest time that the band had spent outside a studio concentrating on a spread of songs. Wilmott recalled in 2011 that he finds it difficult when he hears "about Ian's issues throughout this period, as they are usually horribly remembered and pay little or no attention to his own behaviour which can at best be described as erratic."
Tracks from the album had been worked on in conjunction with songs from the earlier-released EPs. Some of the album's tracks were worked on by the band at the same time as "Summer's Last Sound" and "Love Stepping Out", the two songs from the Summer's Last Sound EP in 1992, their first sample-based release. Crause recalled that "Summer's Last Sound" and those particular D. I. Go Pop songs "sounded much more exciting" than "Love Stepping Out". Ned Raggett of The Quietus noted that the band's following EP, A Rock to Cling To, was recorded at the same time as the songs that would eventually form D. I. Go Pop. Wilmott recalled that the title track of A Rock to Cling To was "very much a part of the D. I. Go Pop sessions" and was originally intended to appear on the album. Crause and Wilmott had also both read The Timelords' "how to have a number one single" book The Manual, which "bizarrely" had an effect on the way that they approached this batch of songs, and the title Go Pop reflected that.
Music
D. I. Go Pop furthers the band's sample-based innovative sound, and is often said to be the band's most uncommercial and least "pop" album, bringing irony to the album title. Adrien Begrand of PopMatters said that, after the innovative post-rock sound established on the EPs, "the band was quickly moving toward something big, and it would all come to a head on [D. I. Go Pop]". According to Scott Plangehoff of Pitchfork, the album is "the most challenging and least 'pop' full-length in the band's catalog," adding that it "retains the arpeggios and fractured melodicism of their then-recent singles, and adds increasing layers of disorienting samples and paranoia." He commented that "D. I. Go Pop is an album of contradictions: Prescient, uneasy ballads like 'Even the Sea Sides Against Us' and 'A Whole Wide World Ahead' recoil from the potential cruelty of human nature but are tethered by an aching off-kilter beauty." Critics have described D. I. Go Pop as a post-rock and experimental rock album.
Ned Raggett of The Quietus said the album was an album of "urban sound with seaside and seasonal reveries that aren't quite that, a burst of activity that could also be a last gasp." Writing for AllMusic, he said that "pop hooks existed on the record, but only in the most spare, hard-to-find of forms; otherwise, Disco Inferno was out to create an album to challenge as many listeners as possible without fully embracing a noise approach." Begrand said that "one would expect that the end result would wind up being nothing more than a chaotic, noisy, haphazard, cut-and-paste attempt at musical assemblage, and yeah, there is a fair bit of cacophony on this album, but like My Bloody Valentine’s timeless classic Loveless, underneath the din is an album of such startling beauty, and even more surprising structure, that once you notice it, it seems like a huge revelation."
Raggett also commented that Rob Whatley was "transformed" from being "just" a drummer to "someone also playing percussive samples and other sounds", which "took the man/machine focus of a figure like Stephen Morris and ratcheted it up into a different realm," whilst Crause was described as writing "angry" lyrics for the album. Crause, "an admitted misanthrope," often delivered a "very bleak, Morrissey-esque worldview" in his lyrics on the band's early singles, and Begrand noted that "although you do hear bits and pieces of a similar sentiment on this album (“Chameleon skin/Is what you need to be in/When nothing's as it appears/Why should you be?”), his vocals are buried so deeply in the mix, it's impossible to tell just exactly what he's singing most of the time." The plaintive, melancholy "Even the Sea Sides Against Us", one of the more instantly accessible songs on the album, revisits the more post-punk sound of their earlier material, as Crause's lyrics "sound as charmingly morose as ever ("We're waiting for a future to come and sweep us away")." Scott Plagenhoef of Pitchfork said that "on much of the album, Crause's bitterness and aggression seems trapped in a swirl of larger sounds, his voice and fears struggling to be heard or comprehended above the dins of abstract noise and the weight of the world around him."
Composition
According to Raggett, opening song "In Sharky Water" begins with water sounds, a basic bass and a drum's low pulse, before leading into "the drowsy swing of the band followed by the most abstract aggression anyone had ever come up with since Wire on 154." "New Clothes for the New World" features Crause's "distorted and fragmented" vocals playing against "ragged" church bell samples and a jaunty whistle. Raggett noted his voice and lyrics project "the electronic paranoia which Radiohead polished up very well for OK Computer, but he's all the much more intense, crackling with a nervous energy and lingering horror for what will be just around the corner." "Starbound: All Burnt Out & Nowhere to Go" features "camera clicks" and a looping, "squiggly 'everybody everybody' chant" alongside "deliberate guitar pluckings". "A Crash at Every Speed" features a "guitar grind" playing "amidst the trebly chaos of keyboards, cars, glass shards [and] planes."
"Even the Sea Sides Against Us" "floats on an acoustic guitar bed endlessly looping around a series of wave sounds and odd keyboard touches, and so forth." Raggett noted how the song "turns to the profoundly, coldly, electrically beautiful, soft strum-like sounds, high twinkles, an unexpected balm even as Crause pitilessly notes 'You don't expect to be seen, you don't expect to be heard.'" "Next Year" features "plaintive" vocals performing as "an odd voice of hope amidst wheezing, clattering sounds and crunch." Raggett said that "A Whole Wide World Ahead" conjures up "the acoustic guitar/rain combination in newer, stranger ways, odd unexpected rhythms, [with] Crause noting, 'There's not enough shelter from all the madness around' as the melancholy flow gets more desperate and lost." The album finishes with "Footprints in Snow", which "sparkles and twinkles" and was the described as the album's only moment "of hope". Andrew Unterberger of Stylus Magazine called it one of the "loveliest songs of D.I.’s career." The song ends with a found sound tape recording of a landlady of a Stratford, London pub asking the band to turn the volume down, taken from one of the band's early concerts.
Album cover