White Car: Everyday Grace

A review I wrote for FACT magazine.

It seems like we are rapidly approaching the alarming point where more music will have been made attempting to replicate the sounds of the eighties than was ever produced during that decade. Hippos In Tanks are no stranger to this trend, but rather than pump out a stream of faux-shoegaze they have thankfully opted to push the vibrant midi-funk of Ford & Lopatin, Laurel Halo’s early techno-referencing Hour Logic, and the industrial-inspired body music of White Car.

The Chicago outfit turned heads with the No Better EP in 2010, and are finally back with a full LP and a press release that reads like the back of a William Gibson novel. Originally a collaboration between songwriter Elon Katz and producer Orian Martin, this time Katz is driving solo, although Martin makes a cameo as that staple of eighties dance acts – the electronic percussionist. All the key musical signifiers are still in place – the uncompromising electronic experimentation of Cabaret Voltaire, the distorted vocals of EBM and the bleakness of cold wave – but the album’s runtime gives Katz more space to bend these tropes around his own personality.

Everyday Grace opens with a burble of sequencer arpeggios dissolving into distorted human cries, continuing the cyberpunk theme of the blurred boundaries between man and machine. At times this can be a self-consciously dark and claustrophobic record, the soundtrack to a warped Cronenberg nightmare where you rip off your skin to find circuit boards underneath. As 808 beats hammer you into submission on ‘Slime The Dog’ and ‘The Factor’, or a solitary synth line cuts through the industrial smog on ‘In The Second Month Of The Year’, it’s becomes clear why Katz refers to his studio as ‘The Techno Dungeon’.

This fetishism for analogue equipment (synths, sequencers and drum machines are the order of the day) gives the album a hard, tangible quality that is hard to replicate, but also means there’s a degree of monotony in Katz’s adherence to a select palette of sounds. Sometimes it feels like his own personality is drowning in a sea of cables and keyboards, a theme he plays up on ‘Terminal Body’ when he wails “Everywhere I go there is the right technology / everything I am in just won’t let me be me”. Yet it never quite succumbs to its technology-induced paranoia, thanks to tongue-in-cheek vocals that can progress from pitched-down monotone into deranged pleading in the space of a verse, while retaining a healthy dose of post-punk irreverence for the source material.

It’s the moments where Katz allows his humanity to shine through that are the most effective. ‘Feed Me’ is a delicious slice of synth-pop that manages to be both sordid and seductive, while the effortless bounce and breathless vocals of album closer ‘Now We Continue’ echo the clinical boogie of early Prince. By injecting his industrial despair with a healthy dose of funk, Everyday Grace strikes a balance between a number of disparate eighties genres to create something new that demands your full attention.

Lindstrom: Six Cups of Rebel

A review for FACT magazine.

Hans-Peter Lindstrøm will forever be shackled to the “cosmic disco” tag. Alongside long-time collaborator Prins Thomas and fellow Scandinavians Todd Terje and Bjørn Torske, he has spent the best part of a decade churning out other-worldly music that uses the 4/4 rhythms of disco as a launch pad to aim for the stars. With Terje’s well received It’s the Arps EP still ringing in our ears after its release last month, it seems we’re already due for another dose of Nordic hedonism.

There is definitely something celestial about album opener ‘No Release’, with its MIDI organ loop relaying into infinity while synth pads slowly ascend into a beatless crescendo. To stick with the astronomic analogy, this is the sound of Lindstrøm charging up the engines and preparing for take-off. Only with ‘De Javu’ does he break through the stratosphere, powered by a restless 303 bassline and bursts of synth horn, and by the time we get to ‘Magik’ it’s clear the producer is planning to take us further out than ever before. A stellar swirl of organ licks, rolling drums and hypnotic chanting, it’s refreshingly dismissive of the standard template of builds and drops, instead opting for a myriad of musical flavours that wash in and out seemingly at random.

While on his last solo release, 2008’s Where You Go I Go Too, Lindstrøm seemed content to stretch out a single concept to breaking point, it now seems he has more ideas than he can squeeze into each track. This is the first time the producer has used his own vocals and they appear in numerous guises throughout the album, from the deranged Green Velvet-esque chants of ‘Quiet Place To Live’ to a passable George Clinton impression on ‘De Javu’. It’s light years away from the subdued Balearic disco he’s been releasing with Prins Thomas or the low slung ’80s grooves he laid down for vocalist Christabelle in 2010. Left alone at the controls, it sounds like he’s decided to press every button at once and see what happens.

In a recent FACT interview the producer said the album was styled as a DJ mix, and it’s possible to hear 6 Cups as an inheritor to the free-form mixes of “cosmic” pioneer Daniele Baldelli. So we get prog-disco rubbing shoulders with the wildest excesses of p-funk, while afro rhythms flirt with the down-pitched 808s of electro. Even the songs merge into each other in unusual ways, with the acid bassline from ‘Call Me Anytime’s bleeding into the title track, only to be interrupted by funk drum fills.

This is an album with more costume changes than a drag queen, and the shameless flamboyance to match. That’s not to say there aren’t moments where Lindstrøm’s new-found exuberance is hard to swallow. The stadium rock guitar that introduces ‘Quiet PlacTo Live’ wouldn’t sound out of place on the Flash Gordon soundtrack, while the opening minutes of ‘Call Me Anytime’ are a discordant mess, but both tracks eventually settle down into satisfying rhythmic workouts. Lindstrøm has clearly embraced his ‘cosmic disco’ tag as a statement of intent, and while the final result may be uneven in places, if you leave your inhibitions at the airlock you’re guaranteed an enjoyable ride.