They were just style ponies, kitted hipsters making tortuously boring fashion
music, retro-electro acolytes from the way-back happily riding the electrocash-in
bandwagon and cha-chinging their way through a rainforest's worth of glossy-mag
photo spreads (spread wide). They were a pair of perfectionists, defined by their
post-scripted period (y'know, like, full-stop), so large and in-charge that their
songs came off like so much musical geometry, openly architectural, more about
perfectly-ruled space than anything remotely human — these qualities thereby
endearing them to the world of coiffed cool, which abhors the human qualities.
Adult. were
all these things, but listening to the Adult. on D.U.M.E., it seems that
they are now not, the inference, indeed, in such being that maybe in the midst
of making all that heartless, gear-driven music they had bleeding hearts underneath
the knobs and cogs, and the way they were writ large and in-charge of a depressingly
skin-deep musical movement was less their doing, and more the doing of marketeers
and the sheep whose robotic dreams are whatever they're told to be and sold as
being. Two years since last drinks, Adult. have re-risen as bud from the same
seed, still sown in authentic analog electro-tone, still placing their roots
in the trodden-down dirt of bygone days, still a pair of perfectionists punctuated
by a period. Yet, now they're on an extended hiatus from their Ersatz Audio imprint
and bedding down with Bettina Richards' iconic Thrill Jockey empire, there's
something suspiciously, coincidentally "this is our punk-rock" about the rusted
sounds Adult. gather and sing with on D.U.M.E., a six-track disc dedicated
to ditching the baggage of their past. It finds Nicola Kuperus Ari-ing up a new-wave
banshee wail whilst the pair knock up synths until their belly swells and sewer
smells emit the same odious tonality as the wire-fried gear burnt black by the
black-hearted heroes/heroine Add N to (X). They don't quite get that, like, punk-rock,
but they do use and abuse guitars ("Get Me Out"'s spastickated twitching twigging
they've been listening to Liars), and, in such, in all of such, they're sure
punching with more punch than they did when resuscitating the stand-and-deliver
sexlessness of analog-electro past with blank face and vacant stare.
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