Bureau B
This baby’s got kinetic candy aplenty, tearing up that flat ’80s graph paper, banishing machine rigidity in a blur of angles. Any inkling of metronomic dead flesh is given a dust kicking of sampledelics bolstered by live trumpets and fret slipping guitar, the momentum throwing your head in pleasing multiples, keeping the adrenaline churned up.
“Automatic” is a great start, a Rubik’s cube of flashing colour, a sequential squeeze of overlapping goodness spurred on by a jog of beat and pulsing travelators, little hints of chorus bending your ear here and there ending in filter fairy fade out. The following track “Don’t point the bone” has a pleasing
DAF-esque stomp about it as those sado-slapped contours flex their muscles and sampled clusters fall between the rifts whilst the frog croaked percussion is licked in flurries of
Gilmore-eque fancy. This track sparkles like a carefully balanced gyroscope in constant threat of toppling, like some audio Jenga full of bizarre dance moves – I can’t believe this is the product of ’86 as it sounds light years ahead of its day. But even by today’s standards the programming on “DRUM!” is a mind-boggling jabby blur of edge caught refractions as it dances that virtual circumference of headbutted keys all
über-animated, tactile, working differing dimensions at the same time, bouncing your skull like some agitated insect.
I’m loving the “Muffler A”‘s bassy angulations and cow bell chintz, that live trumpet counteracting the clinical peppering of beats with silky stocking skids. The funky flummox of elasticity on “Prehistoric” is pretty good also, as it struts out a construction kit of drummed reputation between snappy bass pluck’n’slap , this Parisian accordion agreeably shadowing the foray to the tracks demise. The way “The Truth” is a bubbling majestic parade of experimental karaoke gets me too, the way it sounds like a
David Sylvian classic on the back of a withering squid. Between all this are sketchy little culs de sac of experimentation,
tracks full of that “see what this does” pizzazz, boxing matches of squirted texture and buckled beat, some of which are almost comic in their bodily suggestiveness. Tracks like “Echaos” or “Die Wirren” becoming cute little diversions, tinselled scintillations of the real meat of the album. By the time the soft cushions of clarinet on “Muffler B” end the original album in a twilight of smeared comedowns you’re left feeling quite satisfied indeed; something which is carried nicely into the
Manu Guiot remixes tagged on the end.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
This baby’s got kinetic candy aplenty, tearing up that flat ’80s graph paper, banishing machine rigidity in a blur of angles. Any inkling of metronomic dead flesh is given a dust kicking of sampledelics bolstered by live trumpets and fret slipping guitar, the momentum throwing your head in pleasing multiples, keeping the adrenaline churned up.
