Something Cold [coll] – [Suction Records]

Pretty cool that the foremost US town for advancing beats for decades
sets its motion detectors and emotion deflectors for the cold wave
revival. This collection, could pull plenty of weird people out into the
Wierd world of , but it is not New York, this is Detroit, and the
frozen fruit of DJ Deadbeat aka Justin Carver’s efforts. All of the bands
on this are making their KFJC debut here, making the gods of diversity
smile. Not all of them are from Detroit though. If one thing unites them,
it’s the fact that despite being built of electronic waves and digital drums,
there’s a surprising rawness to the sounds, the lyrics and at times the
production. Minimal wave can often thrive in air-tight labs, but this has a
gritty, almost fleshy edge like an empty factory with broken windows and
some small birds nesting inside a defunct incinerator. Make no mistake, this
is synthesized music. But dig the male *and* female voices cavorting on
Os Ovni’s, “Ode to a Space Convict.” Especially Good follow with something
more like a John Carpenter outtake from moonbase nine. YOU might be my
favorite, with the sound of dead helicopters on scrambled TVs joined by a driven
beat and phonecast exhortation of lyrics. Subtitles feels like a cracked
physicist’s bastardized version of rap. Or maybe he’s just a “Flash and
the Pan” fan? Anyways, plenty of detachment to go around here, all the
hip robots will rotate their resistors and pop their sprockets, but you can
still see the eyes of kids behind the iron masks and steel exoskeletons
looking for similar eyes to blink back to the beat.

-Thurston Hunger