Mighty Wind

The British music press recently heralded neu-rave as the sound of summer. Dandi Wind, a Vancouver-based singer with a clipped goth accent and a bank of synths backing her, quickly became the nascent movement’s poster girl. Little surprise, since the siren-squealing sounds on her new album, Concrete Igloo, burrow into your skull with all the subtlety of a jackhammer. The frantic beats -- which pretty much pound away relentlessly from the very first blip -- skip along at a seizure-inducing pace. Wind and keyboardist Szam come off like a candy-colored art project at times, putting as much focus on their look as their music. But it’s a multimedia assault often worthy of the buildup. Wind skitters and scrambles over the music in a twitchy attempt to keep up. When she falls behind, the tracks take an even more surreal shape.
Sat., July 28, midnight