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Jun 16, 2023 Web Exclusive By Ben Jardine

When a band grabs onto a concept for a record, the result can be sprawling and without tether. On Django Django’s fifth studio album, Off Planet, that concept is outer space and ufology, and the result is indeed sprawling, and fittingly reflective of the subject matter.

The album’s 21 tracks were written to be separated into four parts, or “planets”. The core duo of David Maclean and Vincent Neff began working on the tracks around the time of 2021’s Glowing in the Dark, with the intention to make beats that sounded unlike the band’s previous material.

The album’s first single, “Complete Me” (from Part 1), features long-time collaborator Self Esteem (aka Rebecca Taylor) and plays like dance pop from the early 1990s. The album’s second single is the club doozy “Don’t Touch That Dial” (from Part 2), and features Yuuko, who Maclean apparently found in a Google search for “Japanese rapper.” Although they were released separately, Parts 1 and 2 are two pieces of a larger puzzle. The tracks, and the others on the separate EPs, blend rave music and dance pop, and elsewhere, the songs have elements of Afro beat, acid house, blues, and soul.

Off Planet features a festival’s worth of other collaborators, including “Afro-rave pioneer” Toya Delazy (“Galaxy Mood”), North London’s Refound (“Hands High”), Stealing Sheep (“Dead Machine”), and so many more.

One particular highlight is “Slipstream,” nestled in Part 4 of the record, which is an epic, five-minute opus which sounds like it combines aspects of Django Django’s sound from the last decade.

In making Off Planet, the band attempted to dismantle their sound, journey outward in a mission of discovery, but in the effort, they rebuilt Django Django in a lackluster and exhausting 21 track endeavor. It’s clear that the group attempted making an album that was ostensibly un-Django Django, but the result is sometimes a tedious slog, much like a journey to a far-off planet. (www.djangodjango.co.uk)

Author rating: 6/10