16 posts tagged “synthpop”
Yeah, yeah--I know. You ask: Pegritz, where the hell have you been for the last...howevermany months? Did you die? Were you off exploring the Jovian system in a hotwired UFO? Did the post-Singularity quantum computer running your simulated consciousness crash or catch a sentient virus? No, no, and--sadly--no. The truth is far more mundane and thoroughly unexciting. I ran into some weird problems uploading tracks to this site, and thought that maybe I'd exceeded my storage here...but it wasn't that. Not sure what caused the problem, but I got disgusted with it and just stopped using Vox for a bit. Then everytime I wanted to start up again and see if things were running smoothly once more, some bullshit arose that distracted me. Losing my shit job was one of them. But, now that I am a "man of leisure"--that is, a lazy slob living on unemployment benefits, which means I don't have the money to ever leave the house--I've got plenty of time to start smackin' y'all across your faces with some tight jams once again!
I couldn't mention Ultravox in the last post without following it up with two of my alltime favorite Ultravox jams. "Why two?" you ask. Well, why do I always post two jams by the same band?--because they're so fucking awesome they deserve double the love! *Smack* So just shut the hell up, play the music, and get ye some edumakayshun in the glory that was the New Romantic movement. Or, at least, the one band who embodied its ideals the best.
The Year 2000 was a Big Year for synthpop--the biggest year since...well, the early '80s--and the New Millennium's synthpop revival was primarily driven by a little midwestern label called A Different Drum. ADD was home to some of the biggest names in synthpop at the Turn of the Century: Cosmicity, B! Machine, Iris, The Echoing Green, and Faith Assembly--all of them unique in individual sound but united in aesthetic: creators of stellar pop music using synthesizers.
Why is MSTRKRFT so popular? People talk about these guys like they are the saviours of electronic dance music--but, really, they're no more creative nor clever than Benny Benassi. Their songs all sound alike--the same thumping beat, the same overdriven, slightly-bitcrushed synths, the same occasional vocal samples. Honestly, it's just plain ol' unexciting club music. The end.
Today's offering--posted before today's even an hour old--is the complete opposite of yesterday's offering. While Soap&Skin was all about the beauty of despair and the celebration Sturm und Drang, Allison Goldfrapp's "Happiness" is just about...happiness. That's all. Nothing complicated here, just a wonderful, ebullient song that never fails to bring a little light into my day (even in the middle of the night) and a smile to my face.
I really don't like Goldfrapp's latest album, 2008's Seventh Tree. Quite frankly, after the glitzy synthpop of Black Cherry and Supernature, this album is a dull and boring collection of dull and boring songs--with two exceptions: "Happiness" (duh) and "Cologne Cerroni Houdini." And while "Happiness" is definitely a synthpop tune, its bomp-bomp-bomping horns and piano and beat all have that quintessentially Mancunian sound that defined the Beatles and became inseparable from the term "britpop." It's so British it literally makes your teeth bad and your musical tastes better.
This song is a bright, bouncey, brilliant jam that recalls the danceable jams from Goldfrapp's previous two albums while taking a very sunny '60s approach to production. It almost sounds like her covering an old '60s tune--something that would've been huge on the American pop charts during the era of the British Invasion. This song would be perfectly at home on The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, but instead it's lost amid a sea of mediocre, beatless songs on Seventh Tree...which is a tragedy. But you know what? You need the album anyway, because this song is on it.
Oh--and have you seen the video?! It's just as bright and quite literally as bouncey as you'd imagine it. Done in one single long take, the video follows a white-clad fellow emerging from the basement apartment of a typical Manchester block of homes on his way to his job at the local branch of the Ministry of Silly Walks. Along the way, he meets a variety of people and entertains them so much that, at the end, the whole lot of 'em are following this avatar of good times down the street, clapping away. Seriously--check it out:
Now that is happiness! If my legs weren't all messed up, I'd be hopping along to this song anytime I heard it...which could no doubt lead to some interesting times! Anyway, there you go: a quick intramuscular injection of 20cc worth of sheer golden happiness. Enjoy! (I honestly cannot imagine that you wouldn't.)
Röyksopp's newest album, Junior, adds yet another piece of evidence to my long-running argument that any and all electronic music originating in Norway, Sweden, Germany, or any other country who utilizes umlauts is by definition flawless. Though I wasn't too crazy about their all-instrumental first album, which just sounded like fairly average eurotechno with a little IDM thrown in, they really crashed hard into my sensorium with The Understanding; adding vocals to their mix really completed them. Oddly enough, though, the best track from Junior is actually an instrumental...but it's one of the best instrumentals I've ever heard.
Yeah, that's right: I'm posting another Junior Boys' song from their uneven, but latter-half-excellent new album Begone Dull Care. Here's why: "Sneak A Picture" is the "two" in the one-two punch combination of "Hazel" and "Sneak A Picture," the two songs that make this otherwise bland album turn right around and become awesome. Here's my analysis of why "Sneak A Picture" is such a great jam:
Man, don't you just hate it when an artist whose last album you absolutely loved puts out a thoroughly mediocre--or, at least, uninspiring follow-up? Depeche Mode did it to me twice: everything they released after Violator was complete crap, until they released Playing the Angel--a total masterpiece. But now they've followed it up with the extremely down-letting Sounds of the Universe, which is almost but not quite as bad as Dave Gahan's solo album. (For the record, nothing could ever be as bad as Dave Gahan's solo album.)
What really depresses me, though, is that I expect that from Depeche Mode--a band who has become so incredibly hit-or-miss since the 1980s that I honestly can't even say whether I really like them anymore or not. I did not expect that from Junior Boys, whose last album, So This Is Goodbye, was so unbelievably good I couldn't stop listening to it for months...and even lately, it's found a home again in my car's CD player. Their new album, Begone Dull Care, though...? Maybe So This Is Goodbye was just such a mindblowing album that nothing could ever quite top it. It's not unreasonable to follow up a Perfect Record with one that's just not quite as great. But I didn't expect them to release an album as dull as Begone Dull Care. What an ironic name for the album.
But the truth is, the album is only half dull. Out of eight tracks, only the first four a borrowing, murky messes. Whereas So This Is Goodbye was an incredibly clean album, sharply-produced and full of wonderfully clear 8-bit synth sounds, the first half of Beyond Dull Care is muddy and lackluster: the beats are your standard four-on-the-floor thudthudthud and the synths are...well, anything but crisp and clean. The songs sound almost like they're submerged in a thin layer of mineral oil--just enough to blur their sound a bit but not enough to make them unintelligible. Nonetheless, they're over-long and bland.
But then, beginning with the fifth track "Hazel" and proceeding to the album closer "What It's For," the album becomes awesome again. "Hazel" has a crisp, jammin' beat, echoey guitar strums, and a bitchin' buzzy bassline that recaptures So This Is Goodbye's oldskool arcade-game sound. The melody is striking and the song is imbued with that lustrous melancholy that makes the best synthpop so damned good. This is a TOTAL jam, especially when the bitcrunched, twitchy synth solo comes crackling in. Now this is what I was expecting from Junior Boys!
Best of all, they keep the energy that they summoned up in "Hazel" going through the rest of the album as well, and the dullness, indeed, is begone! Awesomeness, yo. Junior Boys haz it...at least for half the album. Chances are the rest of it will grow on me eventually, too, but for now I find that the second act of Begone Dull Care is VASTLY superior to the first act--but that's just fine: even if the album starts off on the wrong foot, it really picks up the pace and the dancesteps by the middle and finishes off proper.
I'm a mellow but rushed mood today--in that I'm feeling pretty chill after a long, extremely hot bath that has chased the fibromyalgia into hiding for a bit, but that bath has made me kinda/sort late for work (oh well, what're they gonna do? fire me? I DON'T CARE!)--so here's a quickie:
