Chasing Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel...
3..2..1..Go! The prompt begins and ends the latest Dorio production, starring Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel. Motion-blurred scenes coalesce in an imagined spy thriller soundtrack, cutting across club pop, neo-acoustic, and textured electronica. In eleven jet-setting tracks, the Texas duo reconfigures classic pop sensibilities and cocktail lounge idioms into a thoroughly modern work. The project’s newest LP marks a confident development in Chad Doriocourt and Rachel Rascoe’s co-songwriting and CD-age experimentation. Dorio’s mission starts now.
Fuzz guitars, monophonic synthesizers, and bouncy drum breaks fuel a tale of covert operations on Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel. The album’s propulsive production cuts across a pristine millennium palette, from Madonna’s 1998 Ray of Light all the way to Gorillaz’s 2010 Plastic Beach. Rising to meet the energy of live audiences, Doriocourt’s dance-oriented production amps up Rascoe’s twee singsong melodies. It’s music readymade for both recreational and listening formats. “Sometimes it’s like I’m the club, and Rachel’s the pop,” says Doriocourt. “We really leaned into the capacity of pop songwriting to instantly create a fantasy or luxury in an immediate, instinctual way,” says Rascoe. “You can get from point A to point B real fast.”
The concept solidified when the longtime partners separately penned character-driven tracks, “Chasing Agent Friday” and “Perfect Angel,” in accidental alignment. These devilish alter egos, Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel, would guide the album’s double-crossing international espionage. Handoff hooks and turnkey phrases set up the album’s themes of dogged obsession, where chase scenes embody Doriocourt’s experiences with OCD. Intense selects like “My Own Personal Racer” drive the narrative: “Leather seats, automatic… turbo speed, dare you to find me.”
“This is the first Dorio album where I’ve ever felt fully emotionally connected to the whole, beyond just the music and production,” says Doriocourt. The rogue agents are chased by a pair of forthright sleuths, Detectives Marcello and Star, who receive their own interlude themes (“In Marcello’s Obsession” and “Det. Star”). The LP sleeve and videos lay out the cast of doubles, continuing Dorio's highly integrated visual world. Spy flicks from The Conformist (1970) to So Close (2002) provided glamorous inspiration from across decades. “Maybe it’s this life we wish we had,” says Doriocourt.
The recording process proved why lush lounge-electronica and spy movies have long made a perfect match. Alongside Madonna, soundtracks across the Austin Powers franchise looped in major Dorio touchpoints: Fantastic Plastic Machine and Pizzicato Five, both leaders in the 1990s lounge revival. Rascoe suspects that the album’s recurring devil/angel duality stemmed from Doriocourt’s fanatical playing of FPM’s 1999 “There Must Be An Angel” remix around the house.
The project’s fourth LP continues work with the label Earth Libraries. The new album arrives just a year after their previous album, Super Love 3, which Flood Magazine called “an upbeat form of bubblegum-pop and hip-hop percussion that recalls the recent neo-psych output of Stones Throw Records.” During the making of Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel, the duo sent back and forth bulletproof tracks from TLC, Vitamin C, and Natasha Bedingfield. You probably know the ones.
Across the album, Dorio presents a stylized tale of internal negotiation and double identities. High-speed pursuits meet bold, build-by-letters choruses. Within subtler, acoustic-guitar-driven songs like “Romantic,” Doriocourt’s hushed vocals meet Rascoe’s brighter, emphatic melodies. “International Rolling CR28” reminds of the vulnerability in the multiplayer fantasy, asking, “Do you feel okay, international superstar?”
“You chase it away, but then you realize that it was you all along,” says Doricourt. “Through going to therapy, I realized I was fighting these two sides of myself. The two characters are the same.”
In a series of videos directed by Nick Stoner, the charismatic leads within Dorio’s Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel chase each other around an imagined Austin, driving sports cars and peering through spyglasses. The album’s playful clash of alter egos accents essential pop songwriting and a truly innovative production vision. It’s Dorio’s most intuitive and eclectic work yet. In the end, all the stars and doubles and mirrors of Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel meet face to face, one in the same.