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When their second album
Temporary Pleasure failed to hit
the heights of their debut album, sounding a bit like pop dish-water to the
electro explosion of
Attack Decay Sustain Release, it seemed that Simian Mobile Disco were feeling a little stifled by their earlier success. Shaking
off any lasting associations with the long dead nu-rave movement that propelled
their career, the duo’s announcement in January that they were to spend a year producing
and playing
only techno was perhaps in retrospect less shocking than it first
appeared.
Delicacies brings together all the tracks released
from the four EPs that they’ve released over the last year, offering a disc
of unmixed DJ friendly tracks and a mixed CD for the headphone experience. Never
feeling quite like a cohesive album, the record works on a song-by-song basis –
feeling much more like a DJ resource than a conventional LP.
Aspic and Nerve Salad offer a very strong start to
proceedings, with the former offering huge crisp beats, double-kicking drums
and tasty, echoing minimal blips that build into a fierce and dark peak. Nerve Salad takes things even
further, offering an industrial track that wouldn’t sound out of place on an
M-Plant compilation. With its fast kick-drums and menacing whirrs, the track erupts
into a breakdown of strange chimes and a deep, hypnotically thudding baseline. Later, the excellent Hákarl takes this industrial element even further - offering a growling bass and rolling drums that flat-line into a drone infused breakdown, the suddenly dropping into some unbelievably hard tech beats.
Thankfully, SMD don’t stick to one sound for the whole
album. The housier efforts of Casu Marzu lighten the mood a little, with
its rattling percussion and warm synth pulses that build almost toward a more
typical Simian melody and another of the album’s standout moments. Further on Sweetbread
offers riffs and claps, wonky percussion and a
reverb-heavy, tinny peak that concludes another strong offering.
Accusations of imitation are as unfounded as they are
laughable, as is the argument (vehemently made by a competitor dance-music website)
that because minimal isn’t as fresh as it was in 2006, it’s a lame duck. This
is a laughable piece of criticism on both accounts; certainly some of the
tracks feel a little techno-by-the-numbers (Thousand Year Egg, Skin
Cracker) and final track Ortolan wears its Border Community
influence on its sleeves, but to suggest the tracks fall short because minimal
isn’t the coolest shit on the block is an observation of the scene’s detractors,
rather than its producers or SMD in particular.
Despite the array of killer offerings, the album experience
isn’t always an easy one; the tracks weren’t produced with the intention of someone
sitting down and listening to the album from start to finish. Indeed, the
success of this album is difficult to gauge; certainly there are some
incredibly strong tracks here, especially the main room numbers that will be shuffled into DJ sets well in
2011, but you can’t help but wonder that by sticking to their techno memorandum
the talented duo have constricted, rather than liberated themselves?