Album Of The Week: DJ Dodger Stadium Friend Of Mine

"Lately, I've been singing love songs by myself." "It looks like I'm the one who lost." "Never win, you know you'll never win." On the page, these are elegant phrases, sharply drawn pieces of economical wording that hint at vast oceans of ache without lapsing into woe-is-me verbosity. But that's pretty much all they are. They aren't poems or novels or anything. If you string a bunch of phrases like that together, you won't necessarily get the idea that these fragments make up a story. You sure as hell won't get that they're an L.A.-based emotional epic inspired by John Fante's Bukowski-influencing 1939 novel Ask The Dust. And yet the L.A. duo DJ Dodger Stadium have made exactly those grand claims about their album Friend Of Mine, an album with no spoken passages or guest singers or even really lyrics, and I buy it completely. On Friend Of Mine, these two have found ways to take classic, sweeping, unpretentious house-music sounds and used them to build these big emotional crescendos. Friend Of Mine is an album that works, on its own terms, on some uncanny level, finding an emotional space where the kick drums lock into your heartbeat in more than one way.