You know Dave Rennick as the frontman from Dappled Cities. This is not Dappled Cities. It’s a larger-than-life side project that’s been laced with some kind of 80’s throwback wonder-pill.

As the opening chords of ‘Boys’ jittered into life, I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was listening to Dappled Cities or Depeche Mode. Rennick has wriggled in somewhere in between. With its synthy mellowness giving way to the recurring bleeping melody, I thought perhaps ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ had suffered a near fatal collision with ‘Boys of Summer’.

The whole song is a gorgeous melange of stuttered drums and punctuated harmonies. It makes you feel like dancing with big hair and too-tight pants. 

Lyrically, ‘Boys’ is a not-so-subtle critique on D-grade celebrity poser culture. Perhaps harking back to the eighties is an attempt to appeal to a time when nobody took themselves too seriously. I’ve got a hunch Dave knows what he’s doing to us here as he very prominently declares early in the song… “It FUCKS with my mind!”

‘Boys’ is accompanied by a clip that should not be enjoyed by those with epilepsy. There is neon. There is flashing. There are close-ups of eyes. It’s like someone took some really bad acid and tried to condense the Lord of The Rings trilogy into a three minute montage, filmed in an elevator, backlit with a strobe… It’s pretty good.

Dave will be focussing primarily on his solo work in 2014, and that this is the first in a series of singles which to be released over the next sixth months.

Watch :: Dappled Cities – Many Roads