riding the synthwaves

I haven’t been over to read HRO in several months, but I can only assume that Carles has been assiduously tracking the evolution of chillwave from a low-fi fuzzed out Boards of Canada analogue synths + bedroom vocals into a much more polished, shimmery synthpop movement. Leading the charge down the pipeline of feathered-hair nostalgia are a few neo-retro albums I’m gonna dive into in this writeup.

First up, Wild Nothing’s Gemini.

I know next to nothing about this band/artist — you can read the p4k backgrounder as well as I can — but I’ve taken a nearly unhealthy obsession to this album. The sonic palette is uncannily reminiscent of late-80s/early 90s 4AD, The Cure and some later Smiths output but it’s not a direct rip-off of any of these in the same way as, say, the first Interpol album ripped off Joy Division. It’s evocative without being derivative. The vocals really set it apart, drenched in reverb and hard to make out at times but full of angsty gems like the opener’s “our lips won’t last forever / and that’s exactly why / i’d rather live in dreams / and i’d rather die” to “i know you’re bad / that’s why i like you” from Bored Games. That track, by the way has one of the sweetest electro-tom riffs since Herbie Hancock’s Rockit. No lie.

I’ve been going back and forth on Twin Shadow’s debut album “Forget” since I got it. At times, say a sunny weekend afternoon with it kicking loud on the big speakers, tracks like “Slow” hit this funky sweet spot and cause uncontrollable rump-shaking for me and everyone within earshot. Conversely, I’ve been out with the dogs bumping it on the iphone and George Lewis Jr’s mustache, his crooning and his guitar work (for Twin Shadow is primarily him, a one man act in true chillwave style) piped in through the earbuds has struck me as impossibly contrived, a Hall & Oates for our time, something to be embarrassed at rather than inspired by. “If you get lost on the face of the moon / follow the boy with the yellow balloon.” Huh? Listen and come to your own conclusion; I might need to live with the ambivalence — a Twin Shadow of my own — a while longer.

Stylistically, Young Galaxy’s Shapeshifting shares nearly nothing with the rest of the records under review here, but (a) I’ve had a week or two (ok, maybe more) of obsessive listening to it and (b) their chosen moniker fits the “Adjective Noun” pattern of the other acts under consideration, so they’re in. The story here is that Stephen Ramsay and Catherine McCandless sent their raw studio tracks to Dan Lissvik in Sweden who formed the Arts&Crafts style Montreal indie band into a gleaming Røyksopp / Everything But The Girl techno-pop powerhouse. The results are pretty startling. Compare a nice but not mindblowing track like “Outside the City” from their first eponymous album to one of the cuts from Shapeshifting and you’d hardly know it was the same act. Catherine’s vocals have deepened and taken on a dramatic, theatrical intonation akin to Siouxsie Sioux (“For Dear Life”) or Grace Slick (“High and Goodbye”). The production is Euro-flawless with great thump and epic trance builds. The track that gets me the most is “We Have Everything” but damn, there’s a lot of good stuff here.

The last album under review comes courtesy of The Needle Drop where a mention and a link to The New Division’s bandcamp page was enough to get me excited about the six-track Rookie EP on offer. As their name cheekily suggests, their stylistic influences sit kind of halfway between Joy Division and New Order, blending the dancable drum machine hits of the latter with melancholic vocals of the former. Aside from re-creating the best parts of 80s bands I grew up with, I like this album quite a lot on its own merits; the five-piece act has good interplay between instruments, good vocals and some deep intricate synthwork. Check out the keyboard tones that weave through “Devotion” (yes, yes I know, as in “Songs of Faith and..”) and draw a straight line from cEvin Key’s early Skinny Puppy / Tear Garden stuff. The slashing, echoey guitars over dub techno-house beat in “Festival” are probably the high point of this album for me, but there’s a lot of good stuff to be had - six and a half tracks (the last half is hidden after a few minutes of silence at the end of “Bucharest”) for five bucks. What are you waiting for?

There are always risks in nostalgia: if you evoke something too recent in memory or hew too closely to the source it’s derivative, not homage. The trick is to mix the old with the new and thereby synthesise something that’s unique yet familiar. I think the Wild Nothing album pulls this off best of the batch I’ve reviewed here but they’re all worthy of consideration.