Video: DTCV, ‘Radio Drive’

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Since they first embarked on making music as Detective more than three years ago, the French-American duo of Guylaine Vivarat and James Greer — now going by the vowel-starved DTCV — have been as uncompromising as they have been prolific. Garage-pop, post-punk, shoegaze, noise-rock, prog-punk, new wave: The Joshua Tree-based duo can do it all, and have, on releases that have emerged via Mock, Burger, Lolipop and Dead Meadows’ Xemu Records (2013’s gobsmacking 26-track “Hilarious Heaven”). DTCV washes it all down with a few gallons of subversiveness, at times biting and at times with the pithy impishness of the band for whom Greer used to play, Guided By Voices. (The 2013 gem “Creative Class Dismissed” comes to mind.) Anyway, their latest is “Uptime!” (which came out in April), a buzzing tour de force that finds Vivarat (once of Tennis System, Useless Keys and Molecules) sounding the dreamy pop goddess and Greer playing the urbane one. “Miley Cyrus Wins the Race” is a winner even before you hear a note of it; “Rock N Roll Hall of Fame Induction Song” is perfect for the day Divinyls get honored; “Last Lonely Man” is just plain dreamy; and “California Girl” find Greer the plaintive balladeer, backed lovingly by Claire McKeown and her vocalists in Honey Child. There’s a lot of upside to “Uptime!” — the hard part now might be what deciding goes on a greatest-hits collection by a band that’s only been around three years.

||| Stream: “Miley Cyrus Wins the Race” and “X-Water”

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