Whilst they spoke of having the anxiety always, the boy/girl of Adult. seemed comfortable in their rut, presiding over a sound and scene and label that kept their control-freak nature large-and-in-charge. The Detroiter duo's tonally-authentic and authenticity-obsessed retro-electro racket left little room for any sort of veering, its stylized, stylistic threads seeming, as they progressed, less just buttoned-down and more like a straitjacket.
In the couple years since, since the couple saw the nasty electroclash bandwagon go crash, Adult. have torn up that old wardrobe, tearing up their own tone-specific(ations) rulebook in search of a little more love and adventure, and a lot more cold-war paranoia and hysteria. They first found such amidst a storm of six-strings on their six-song punk-rock agit-prop gap-filler D.U.M.E., but now Adult. try all this noisiness out in the longplaying format. Gimmie Trouble finds them mired in the throes of such, doing such a bang-up job of banging that Slits/Pop Group/Raincoats gong, using retrofuturism to re-render that archetypal bleak-vision-of-a-bleak-future — they, the Adult., looking back and forward now — like they’re inhabiting their own liberty city.
The barometer of this the-waters-around-Adult.-have-grown sea change is Nicola Kuperus, who is now out and proud as frontman, wielding the mic and exhaling the wenchy wails, pushing that lyrical barrow of restless alienation through her vocal hysteria, screaming "Become so obsessed with your modern life/ Over-calculation, what it can provide/ You gotta change directions, if not too occupied" in a way that makes it seem like Adult. have always been open to a change; that that full-stop at the end of their name wasn't their very definition, wasn’t the last piece of punctuation in their pop-cultural tale, it was just the end of a sentence.
And, beginning this post-punk sentence, they rock the gear to go along with Kuperus' vocal hysteria, Tamion 12 Inch's Samuel Consiglio offering — in his year-long official-Adult.-member tour of duty — shrill guitar skree and disco-punk basslines as his frankincense and myrrh, the gold of it all being the way that Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller ditch their normal post-techno niceness to amp up that analog gear until its circuitry fries with all manner of buzzes and klangs, draping the sinewy signals all over rhythms punched in in stabbing fashions, stabbing fashion-music niceness right in the face.
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