All your recent '80s revivalism has been wholly about the currency of cool, kids.
Cool, that erected artifice of style behind which embarrassingly human, decidedly
non-masculine things — like, y'know, emotions and individualism — can
be safely sheltered, such unfitness never to be witnessed by the prying eyes
of rival upright mammals. By (naked) aping the Diazepam'd detachment of the vapid,
vacant Reaganist decade, the hipoisie humanoids have, in their too-easy irony,
bought the myth (like — cha-ching — literally); enthusiastically buying
into being the sort of satirical stereotypes skewered back-in-that-day by Bret
Easton Ellis. And the soundtrack to all this has been completely meaningless
music where, oh, say, a bunch of bands from the shoulder-pad era are drolly read
out in an emotionless monotone, whilst a drum-machine pounds with beats so non-Neptunian
that even y'mama can match them to their era. Swedish duo The Similou are happily
hi-topping their way into retro-electro's laced-up retread: plying gated reverb
on their keytars(!) until it rings out like a Pseudo Echo, painting in purely
plasticky shades of synthetic synth sound, and parading a band logo(!) that looks
the pink neon sign out front of some coke-ridden "Miami Vice" nightclub. Yet,
what separates them from the flock is the way they trade in unbridled passion,
these black sheep daring to wear their hearts on their rolled-up sleeves. Their
debut disc's lead single, "All This Love," screams with an enamored exuberance
probably unheard on a fashion-music dance floor since, like, Daft Punk's "One
More Time." Whilst so much of the lyricism is so much silliness — there's
the repeated motif of "rainbow stylin'" which means little, and the opening verse, "A
city rooftop/ Summer night/ In your tank-top/ Rainbow stylin'," hardly bespeaks
a song wading into the deep end of retro-electro's shallow, shallow pool — hearing
whichever one of these two Similou dudes it is wail the song's chorus (which
features "all this love!" prominently and repeatedly) is enough to fill folk
with the rapture, such rapturousness infectious, the song likely to fill the
floor with love-in-ish lovin', even as the song speaks of its lyrical love leading
to heartbreak (like: "I never felt so blue"). There's nothing else here on their
debutante ball — which, wonderfully, is an album clocking in at 8 tracks/32
minutes — that's quite so stirringly sterling; although, in a beautiful
bookend, there's more super-passionate, vaguely unhinged wailing at the beginning
of the longplayer's last shot, "Boogie Down," where the hilarious refrain "Boogie
now!/ Boogie down!/ I say boogie 'til you bleeeeeeeeed/ In the disco light" is
treated like the ultimate call to arms, having the sand to stand and deliver
an anthem demanding cats forget fears of fucking-up their carefully-coiffed fringe,
and to get up and actually, like, dance, uninhibited, once more (from the top).
Which, whilst hardly revelatory in greater dancin'-music culture, seems wholly
alien to electro's preening, passionless Planet Earth.
|
