Before they shaped the future of music, and before they led the indispensable label that housed this sea-changing output, PC Music’s A.G. Cook and Danny L Harle were just two British kids—“Dux Kidz,” as they called themselves—who wanted to have fun. Their 2012 output under the “Dux” name ranged from happy-go-lucky pop to artfully disfigured hip-hop and even impressionistic classical music. All of these tracks featured commercial instrumentation pulled from romplers, MIDI banks, and sample CDs—an unabashed embrace of sounds once considered tacky and undesirable. Why make an honest attempt at distinguished music with such cheeky components? Because that sort of thing sounded like a damn fun time.
When Dux Kidz turned into Dux Content for the duo’s debut full-length album, Lifestyle, Cook was about to stray away from his “Gamsonite” blog imprint to start PC Music. Lifestyle was the last album from Gamsonite and, when it was re-released a year later in 2013, the first from PC proper. A record that couldn’t have been made without an ear-to-ear grin, Cook and Harle’s lone album as a duo is a maximalist romp through all things ravey, funky, and merry—bringing pleasure to the banal in a showcase of creativity and compositional guile. A new reissue reintroduces the duo’s early brilliance to a contemporary music landscape that wouldn’t be the same if they hadn’t proven that being cheugy could be charming.
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All the roots of PC Music’s digestible maximalism appear in Lifestyle. Hints of what eventually became known as bubblegum bass shine through in “Voice of an Angel”—a Reese bass, reverbed vocal chops, and the Korg M1’s iconic “Piano 16” harmoniously bubble up on the fittingly angelic and rave-ready opener. The title track is packed with saw synths, flutes, and squeaking leads—all inside an arrangement that’s an early picture of the duo’s affinity for baroque compositions and aesthetics. But the album’s crowded mixes are the furthest thing from overwhelming. They’re as much of an emotional spectacle as the raves they score in some portions and the everyday life they hyper-emphasize in others.
Lifestyle grooves just as much as it bangs. “City Break” is a mangled mixture of new jack swing and hardcore, the seamless musical image of two guys who’ve used the aliases “Nu New Edition” and “MC Boing,” respectively. Gated snares and elastic toms lash around like harmless thunder and lightning before being interrupted by a passage of stinging kicks and supersaws, the real pain inflictors here, but it all hurts so good. “Hero Next Door” is Sega Genesis-esque 16-bit funk on steroids—an ostensible ode to Harle’s love for video game music—whose plunky bassline finds a way to be just as funky no matter what time signature and tempo it finds itself in.
Cook and Harle’s vision of seriously unserious fun was indicted as cheap irony for years. Though untrue, it’s easy to see where that accusation might come from upon reaching “Higher Love”—their ultra-processed version of Steve Winwood’s 1986 hit, whose plastic brass stabs and rubber FM bassline soundtracked the aisles of Kmarts for years. The duo reassembles the synthetic components of this corny but lovable classic into something magnificent, evoking the sort of anachronistic majesty you might feel from seeing a product from decades ago freshly refurbished. Shrouded in a reverbed mist, a cast of bell synths and 8-bit waves glisten all across the mix; a Muzak-y sax sings over them, replacing Winwood’s voice in some passages and sprawling into wild solos elsewhere. Somewhere out there, there’s a polo-shirted leader of a Fortune 500 company who claims the original “Higher Love” as his favorite song, and in his head, this is what it actually sounds like.
