Video: 3Oh!3 – “Don’t Trust Me”
3Oh!3. Or at least that’s how it’s written on the page. The Boulder, Colorado-based band has gone Splashwater Falls with high school kids and post-emo undergrads who’ve moved on from that genre’s woe-is-suburban-me overtones to a sound that, instead of wedging screamo and hardcore antics into the mix, mines the remaining shards of the electro blog-house moment to buff up and reveal the cool diamond behind the antisocial coal. Writing drippy MySpace diary entries is one thing. Dancing the cool jam of the moment is better.
It’s true! After all, “Don’t Trust Me,” 3Oh!3’s hot shit single, shares its bottom end power source with numerous chart contenders, including Katy Perry‘s “Hot N Cold” and “Love Drunk,” the current charting single from Boys Like Girls, another group who survived the finale of emo as this generation knew it.
It’s always been easy to sway listeners and move feet to the simple equation of fast+hookz+fizz. But if there’s an overwhelming replacement for the auto-tune sound, look to this production technique, because it worked for Perry and it’s working right now for 3Oh!3. (God, that name. It refers to Boulder’s area code, btw.) In the video for “Trust,” the duo are the appropriately, boringly, jokingly sex-goofy duo you’d imagine them to be. While they aren’t kind to scenesterism on the track, they’re so self-aware about it all. 3Oh!3 are either crudely vocalizing the conventional wisdom of the age group — “We’re all whores; we all love the glitter” — or setting themselves up as the Lyte Funky Ones of a new bloggy era.
It might be nice to write that we should look forward to finding out which it is. But when your outfit’s sound is part of a trend on this kind of chart, in this kind of climate, you should devote your merch revenue to that Quizno’s franchise you were looking into buying before this whole “Do the Helen Keller” bit came to mind.
There’s definitely a global virus, but these dudes won’t survive for long.
JTL
Each week Johnny Loftus will select a song from your hit parade to explicate, celebrate, or humiliate.
303 is actually boulder’s area code. this is all timely for me, since i’m heading out there next week on a trip. it’ll be interesting to see if it’s even acknowledged out there. i don’t mind the cheekiness of it all. i actually look at it as more of a spoof, especially for what seems to be a call out to mgmt with the primal forest scene. then again, what do i know? i can’t keep up with this stuff. though, i dig it for what it is, but i don’t plan on ever listening to it again. of course, unless it’s playing a lot when i’m in boulder next week.