Pitchfork Forkcast: New Music: James Pants: "We're Through" [MP3/Stream]

New Music: James Pants: "We're Through" [MP3/Stream]

James Chance? No, James Pants. There are a few slight similarities, though: Where Chance took the spastic funk of James Brown to New York's smoldering downtown and skronked it out with free jazz, Pants' appetites run more toward early-1980s disco and electro, but both are percussive, twitchy shouters more than singers. On "We're Through", from Spokane, Wash.-based Pants' forthcoming debut Welcome, the beat-making multi-instrumentalist breaks it off with someone in a deadpan that makes it sound like he's already gone. Cowbells and squiggly electronics link the track with dance-punk and recent electro-house, atop looped conga drums fit for some old Arthur Russell-Walter Gibbons 12". Stone's Throw may be better known for hip-hop-- from artists like MF Doom and Madlib to Aloe Blacc and, of course, the late J. Dilla-- but Pants' post-punk take on the carefree sounds that gave birth to early rap isn't really so far from the Free Design-touting sunnier side of label honcho Peanut Butter Wolf, who remixed Pants' recent single "Kash".