electronic
As we tiptoe through sadness and calm, where security is yours for the taking, the song is at once unremarkable yet… once over is instantly missed.
Beauty and compromise run deep through the veins that are stitched into each ebb and flow. Contorted and kept just a shade out of shape, free-flowing down straights and restricted at angles, I find myself pressed and pinched then released by the unnatural designs of the album’s ambitions.
Analogue maps of waking states, organic contortions and textures…. Breakbeat and jungle get stripped to essentials, then stripped down again to an essence.
Harsh isolation, dystopian dreamscapes, semi-connected catharsis caught up in electronic precision.
That’s the evolving sound of Blancmange 2.0; collections of stripped down half hooks, building in escalating elaborations, repeated in sheets of thin ice and cool water. This is Neil Arthur from 2016’s Unfurnished Rooms, through to 2017’s Fader and Near Future, through this year’s Blancmange album Wonderlust.
Austin. Achingly hip and alarmingly cool. Coffee bean fetishists, thrift store hi-glam, nu-age craft ales in gleaming clean structures and retro set wide-eyed fresh faces.
Hot dog and burger bars tower their meats with all kinds of sides, only skyscrapers outside match their stature. Weed’s offered out by bar maids and waiters and I don’t feel young, pretty or thin.
Two legends post transformation.
Underworld have electrified, moved, soothed and tranced. Iggy has lived in and outlived his rivals plus his protegees and remains. Reincarnations, incantations, reflect… and what got grown here came out somewhere in next. Both acts can be tracked through their tectonic shifts and this single ripped right out from nowhere.
Rats on the Run 