discovery of the month: Tomcraft's "Muc" album

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Somehow Thomas Brückner has struck gold. The older stuff was OK but pretty unremarkable, but he's thrown out all the trance and most of the techno - and all his current remixes (Noemi, Andain, Vanguard) are ace, the "Overdose" and "Loneliness" singles are insane, and now the album. It is fucking great - I haven't heard such a consistently strong AND varied 80s retro album since, well, the 80s (OK, perhaps the Zoot Woman album comes close). Lightyears better than that tedious Ladytron CD. Brückner sensibly reserves all the big floorfiller anthem tricks for his remixes for others and the single mixes of his own tunes (the club mix of "Loneliness" is a straight-up banging peak-time tune, while the album version is a melancholic synthpop tune) and throws in everything else on the album: Frankie Goes To Hollywood, OMD, Depeche Mode, Simple Minds, New Order, early 90s hiphop breaks, fat electro basslines, techno and acid, melancholic pianos, human beatboxing. The best thing about it is the *fat* production, most songs are actually danceable unlike all that bored ironic hipster-type electro, but at the same time very dark and threatening. German accented male vocals always sounded better with synthpop than bored female vocals anyway.

― Siegbran (eofor), Tuesday, 28 January 2003 14:27 (twenty-three years ago)

two months pass...

I have about half of this on mp3 now, and I'm really liking it, though possibly not as quite as much as Siegbran. The integrative aspect of it is pretty amazing, and really the core of the thing: the actual movement and songwriting of the tracks (and there really is a surprising amount of good "songwriting") is solid, but it's the unexpected combinations of elements that tends to get more of my attention.

I've made comments here before about dance music engaging with pop structures, and when I've done so I've always been afraid people will think I mean those sub-Morr "bad indie with glitch programming" records. There's a sense in which I mean stuff like this.

By the way, Siegbran, what do you think of "Forever Raver?"

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 17 April 2003 22:28 (twenty-three years ago)

(If I were a member of Europe I would want it played at my funeral.)

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 17 April 2003 22:29 (twenty-three years ago)

Forever Raver is bizarre, it starts out with those silly bleeps and and develops into either a parody or tribute to Ultravox at its most pompous. It's that ambivalence towards the 80s I like most about the album - it's not just the agreed-upon "cool" things from those days that are featured here, it's the rediculous aspects too. In a way it's more "real" than most other retro-fetishists. I can't imagine a song like Schwabing 7. Phase on a Ladytron, Les Rythmes Digitales, Legowelt or Felix Da Housecat album.

And it's nice to see that I was right about the single remixes thing - Into The Light has now been released as a single with the HUGE sounding Kola remix for the floors, and two other mixes that strip the song of all the melancholia of the album version.

― Siegbran (eofor), Thursday, 17 April 2003 23:46 (twenty-three years ago)

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