KFJC 89.7FM
Album Review

Vita Noctis – “Against The Rule” – [Dark Entries]

Thurston Hunger   12/14/2011   12-inch, A Library

Hyper alienation of 1985 Belgium youth. I think it is hard
to get synths these days to sound as raw as Vita Noctis did.
Circuits are too good now and drum machines too snappy.
Here the drum machines sputter as if they know they are
going to be put out of work by a coming wave of Japanese
electronic efficiency. The twin Kips kin formed the band,
and talked Kris’ girl Martine Genijn into joining them. She
can sing, but I actually really liked the male vox on the
earlier tracks. Their unsinging matches even better with the
unlearned unplaying! Shouting in a choppy and bitter English,
the songs often stop, lurch, derail and resume again in
another manner. “Introductory Works” and “Hearing Noises”
are just tremendous art-damaged synth displays. Stuck on
that wedge between punk and new wave, there is some guitar,
but like everything else it gets mangled into beauty, along
with the detuned oscillators and dejected lyrics. The bitter
distrust of youth paired up with a nagging drive to put it to
music is always striking to me, no matter the musical genre.
But adding that alienation to the advance of machines via
early electronic consumer instruments and especially the
anemic drum machines here makes for a potent mix. Much
more biting than a lot of the minimal wave reissues coming
out, this was stands true and tart 25 years down the road.
Talk of a reunion worries me, as I think this caught them at
their apex. Am I the only one who caught an eerie draught
of “Dead Ringers” while listening to this? An exceptional
rerelease, kudos to Dark Entries.

Bitter synth of youth
Foreign feeling foreign tongue
Dark Belgian Brilliance

-Thurston Hunger

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Kris says

love this review ! so right from the heart !

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