Avant! records just emailed me about this super dark electronic split from Lust for Youth and WAR. I finally put two and two together last night and realized WAR was the same band who put out that single on Sacred Bones a little while ago and now I am definitely going to pick up over there as well. Lust for Youth already has Solar Flare on Avant! and they're putting out another one this month or so, both of them I'm just getting into thanks to this single.
A-Side's, "Denial, Veronica" is from the Lust for Youth two piece out of Sweden, immediately there's something about a track like this that combines an ultra minimal sound with this authentic less than clear production. I wish I appreciated that around the time of electronics infancy, (at least for me) back in the early '90s were all these bands like New Order or Information Society doing all kinds of heavily produced dance music and I think I looked down on the homegrown stuff that was popping up even the depths of upstate NY. I can't tell you the number of bands I ended up seeing in the basements of the college near me, when after the "DJ" got done spinning some Skinny Puppy, a random guy would come out with his elaborate keyboard setup and make some damaged unbderwater sounds like this. Still to this day the only way to truly get sounds like this is to actually be pushing the equipment to it's limit, using less and unapologetically going for more and in the process of sincerely going after that expensive sound, hit on something that in and of itsef is just as good as if you had everything you ever wanted at your disposal....this goes for any kind of music, this just happens to be emulating this ancient darker side dance pop. The cheap synth sounds even more appropriate with this technological distance behind it, or given the amount of time that's passed since those days of electronics (I mean even the Pet Shop Boys were cool) it feels like that was so long ago. Lust for Youth is nailing that nostalgia, the buried delay, the layers of static and hiss, electronics run through boards and boards bounced down countless times. The simplest casio string sound... the drums are pale versions of their former selves. It even goes a little 8 bit with a pure static snare sound. But nothing is ever run directly into a device, instead they've hit on that low res sound by maxing out the levels and degrading the sound further and further away from what it used to be. It's even darker when you can't do anthing but try to make this music with inferior equipment. This song seems to go on forver with this simple melody, but it could....it's like a depressed dance, a slow nodding off to this AM radio...
B-Side from WAR, "Somme, Maggio" leads in with a distorted keyboard melody that builds in simple loops, bassy low end busted kick bassline rumbles drone in under this repetition. Completely destroyed, all the speakers are blown. It's inherently got this kind of tension because it's already broken... where else can it go? The delay on the vocal is pushed straight to 11, any words bouncing into each other... the most dystopian view of music, hell, all of humanity to come up with something as alien and dehumanizing as this. Even black metal is created by real people, even if they are worshipping the devil, I can stil relate to them more than this in a weird way. This to me is far creepier, the starkness, the way it's so broken, impossible to decode, deceptive, hyptnotic, and probably one man projects which is even more insane diving into this singualrly black hole mind. Truly original, I have to her more from both of these guys. When the track sounds finally fade out the low end hum is unbelievable. It's amazing what you can get used to.
Get it from Avant! Records.... contact them direct (avant.records(at)gmail.com), work out the shipping for all three of these. Somehow it's even more mysterious that it has to come from far off Avant! What are they doing over there exactly unearthing stuff like this?
This is really all the convincing you'll need... from WAR:
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