There's anxiety always, these days, for Adult., what with life moving pretty fast and all, and what with if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. In the days back when making earnest archaic-electro music was about as cool as this side of the pillow, Adult. got to take their sweet sweetheart's time at cutting tracks, their output'd release-sheet pace walking with a gait a kid could call "glacial" (meant most metaphorically, of course). Since sometime around the time the calendar turned over to some non-Kubrickian 2001 — and we were met not with the future, but the very recent past — Adult. have been flat-out — beavering away, I'd say, fulfilling the newly-found market clamoring to lay their hipster hands on an actual Adult. album, such consumers being not merely satisfied with the gap-filling Resuscitation collation of their original output of sides. I'm sure the Detroit duo have also been roped into taking part in some electrocash-in touring-show deal, too, although whether they filled a spot on a bill before or after the inevitable electrobacklash is another story. Their debut longplayer proper, though, has definitely arrived closer to the latter than the former; the former glory of making mighty unfashionable, unerring recreations of authentic early-'80s tone now no longer embodies the same revolutionary ideas and ideals of embracing "archaic" audio technology that it once did. There's little doubting that Adult. are masters of their craft, students well-studied in the ways and ways of analog gear, the kind of cats who could point out all the period-specific mistakes in depicted equipment that appeared in "Glitter." Where popular pop-culture has recently become flooded with half-ass'd recreations, Adult. are still firmly using both cheeks, their austere beats and sexless vocals and dead-perfect form still clenched as tight as a shiny metal ass. But they're trapped by this, their one-trick shtick; it the same old song, played again, Sam, for all those girls in white belts who won't stop 'til they get enough. So, no, the '80s revival's not dying, it just can't think of anything good to do.
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