Rufus du Sol

One Liner: Good dance house tunes from Sydney
Wikipedia Genre: Indie dance, alternative dance, house
Spotify Says Similar To: Hayden James and Louis the Child
Home: Sydney, Australia

Poster Position: 5
Slot: ?

Thoughts: Wikipedia says that they are known as RUFUS, but in North America they are known as Rufus du Sol.  Which seems weird.  Why would they use different names in different parts of the world.  I'm blaming Trump.  This is three guys making house music to dance to, not the more recently-big EDM sounding stuff, more like the fun house that was big before the Skrillexes and DeadMau5es of the world took over.  They've won a few Australian music awards, including a "Best Dance Release" ARIA in 2015, for their most popular song, "You Were Right."

Pretty good tune.  Here is the thing that confuses me - their Spotify bio says that they were formed in 2010 "when a rain-soaked vacation to Byron Bay turned into an impromptu jam session."  How do electronic artists enter into an impromptu jam session?  Was everyone sitting around with their macbooks on their lap, reading their twitter feeds, when suddenly one of them turned on a sick beat, the other starting throwing in some tight hand claps, and the third one sang a few insane bars about love and peace and the relativity of time?  I can see some guitar nerds having a jam sesh, but I'm not sure I can imagine it with machine music.

Two albums from these guys, 2013's Atlas and 2016's Bloom.  The majority of their top songs come from the new album, with just three off of the older album up in their top ten on Spotify.  That earlier one ("You Were Right") is by far their most popular, with 26.2 million streams, and their next most listened to comes from that first album, "Sundream" racked up 14.9 million streams.

I don't know why the word that comes to mind for this song is "smart."  Something about the tune and clean tone of the music makes me think this is smart music.  Weird thing to think, but there you go.  Watching that video though reminded me of being a kid and watching scrambled Cinemax in the hope of catching a little slice of boob through the scrambled picture.  If only that kaleidoscope was a little closer...  In listening through the newer album, I keep getting snatches of Chris Martin/Coldplay in the singing, even if the music is nothing like traditional Coldplay music.  I like these tunes.  Normally, I wouldn't say that I would go after dance music or electronica, but I've enjoyed listening to these albums for the past day. I guess I like "house" more than "EDM."

Will I go see them in the fall?  Probably not, but seems like it would be fun.