The Steamboat Pilot & Today

Does It Offend You, Yeah?

Steamboat Springs — “You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into”

The guys in Does It Offend You, Yeah? — a quartet of electro-rockers from Reading, England — are kind of full of themselves.

And that works for them.

It’s how they pull off releasing a song called “We Are Rockstars” as a single, and it’s how they pull off the frenetic energy and simple structure that set up the first minute and a half of the track. Throughout the band’s full-length debut, “You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into,” it draws on the most beat-driven elements of more than two decades of pop and electronica to craft an album that’s more like a dance party mix tape than a carefully planned set of songs.

And while Does It Offend You, Yeah? is firmly rooted in thumping bass and synth-saturated glitch, the quartet’s got a hold on what else its target audience is listening to — which is to say, Does It Offend You, Yeah? has no trouble writing a low-key indie rock song. The band even does it well, with “Dawn of the Dead,” a track that relies more on The Cure than it does on Daft Punk.

The song is a down-tempo break from the majority of “You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into,” an album that dances along on super-loaded beats and the easiest melodies Does It Offend You, Yeah? could think of.

More than anything, the band understands what a 10-track electro-pop album is supposed to accomplish. It’s supposed to be fun, and it’s supposed to encourage silly dancing, foot stomping and fist pumping.

The band does that by following a 1960s-TV-action-theme (“Attack of the 60 FT Lesbian Octopus”) with a blunt party anthem (“Let’s Make Out”), and by being generally everything but offensive in its subject matter and accessibility.

So maybe the guys in Does It Offend You, Yeah? are lying to us with their name. But that works for them, too.

Rating: ★★★ 1/2

— Margaret Hair, 4 Points