Biography
Restless People, a Brooklyn-rooted electronic dance and pop outfit, fuses the personnel and aesthetic threads of two earlier projects: the disbanded, stylistically wide-ranging dance-punk quartet Professor Murder—three of whose members, Jesse Cohen, Mike Bell-Smith, and Tony Plunkett (performing as Tony Blankets), now appear here—and Tanlines, the production pair that Cohen formed with Eric Emm before expanding into a live band. Emm, who previously played bass in Don Caballero and Storm & Stress and produced Professor Murder, brought the crisp, treble-heavy electro-tropical atmosphere he and Cohen had shaped in Tanlines directly into Restless People’s sound. That approach dominates the group’s self-titled debut album, issued on Iamsound Records in September 2010, only six months after Tanlines released the Settings EP; although the Restless People collection was marketed as a full-length, it runs merely three minutes longer than its predecessor and stays within the same sonic territory. Working now as a complete band rather than a studio duo, the musicians tilt further toward song-oriented vocal arrangements than pure club tracks, with Emm’s raw, energetic vocals supplying an insistent, punk-inflected optimism. Before the album’s official physical release, several Restless People pieces surfaced through the group’s own online imprint, Family Edition, whose catalog also features EPs by Newborn Huskies and Bulldozier along with humorous TwitPics and YouTube clips fitted with new soundtracks.
Albums