Kick-starting Front and Follow‘s new series celebrating the past and present of some of the label’s regular contributors, the Sone Institute (after a six year hiatus) takes Ex Post Facto by the horns, presenting new work, along with a bonus download album of retrospective highlights and unreleased secrets from their archives.
The new work is brilliant, palpitating on snappy billiards and tinselled Chic shuffles as opener “I Only Exist” adds a discotheque sheen to some tasty left-field word association, then full of nibbling nubiles, “Summer Lightning” spins with soulful stabs and quick-stepped jivers.
The man behind the moniker, Roman Bezdyk, describes Where Moth And Rust Consume as a pop album, but it’s way better than what passes for pop nowadays. The album is light and airy, yes, but it debonairs an eclectic itch that raises it above the more radio-savvy releases out there, and even Idahos some interesting introspectives to boot. The hooks on “The Devil Works In Asda” are great, undercut euphorics rinsed in stiletto(ed) focus and angled cuts. There’s some lovely synth texturing too, notched and knotted with rhythmics, spraying out in groovesome cinematics. Each track muses with plenty of sway-ability — then Roman inserts a surprise bit of solemn choiring attached to a dirgey fairytale to mix things up. The Pram-like Sargasso Sea-sawing of “Justice” (a firm favourite with me) hits some lovely whippy beatitudes as harmonic choirs curl the sizzling keystrokes and distressed dynamics knife up the soft underbelly. “A Gilded Cage” enthusiastically spreads itself into an odd roast of reggae, full of surprising sonic returns, then Roman sets a Kraftwerkian rosiness amongst the electronic pigeons on “Glass Arena”; but it’s the creepy undulations of “Oblique Messages” that really get my vote, a shivering introspection with eavesdropping vocals that scatter-cushion odd asthmatics and Morse-coded noirs that shimmer like a ghosty DDR flashback. A twilighting irrigation that garnishes the album’s departure point of ‘God Bless You” with its decaying melody full of butterflying dust and scratches that slowly burrow under your skin in uneasy pastorals, a vibe the (downloaded) eighteen-track accomplice Past And Spared mines superbly.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
