L.S.G. - Double Vision

Bonzai Progressive: 2017

Crazy to think it took fifteen years for Oliver Lieb to release a full-length album, and a double-LP at that. Yes, including The Unreleased Album, now officially released on his Solieb Digital print, but first made way back in 2002. Also, there was Inside Voices under his own name with Psychonavigation Records, but since that label hideously collapsed, the album's status is currently in limbo. Double Vision though, there is no doubt. Two CDs full of proper new tunes, released on a print in no danger of disappearing, and under an old reliable alias fans have been hoping a return to for ages. Take all my money, Mr. Lieb!

Still, it requests the question, where does L.S.G. fit in modern clime's? The heart-pumping trance that the moniker built its rep' on hasn't been in vogue for an age, and ol' Oliver hasn't shown any signs of returning to that style. He's well moved on from the minimal techno of Solieb – it was only fashionable for a short while anyway – but his few recent, scattered singles seem uncertain where his lane now is. Melodic techno? Spacey tech-house? Whatever thing Norman Feller's managed to sustain a career on? And is there even a need to keep making club singles anyway? L.S.G. had been trending towards the chill-out camps ever since Into Deep, but would there even be interest in another ambient outing after the lukewarm response to Inside Voices? So many options, so many ideas – ah, just double-album the return, filling all the creative needs!

And as CD1 opens with the grand space ambience of Seven Worlds, melting into a slow-burner with groovy rhythms, sci-fi sounds, and epic synth builds of Escape The Galaxy, all I can think is, “Damn, have I missed L.S.G.!” Oliver's always had a unique touch with rhythm and melody, instantly recognizable and never dull (if a little predictable though, one must admit), and long time fans should feel right at home here, tracks like Vapor and Passion reflecting glories past – even the rhythms take what Lieb learned from his Solieb days, putting it to far greater use. And if you do need some evolution along with his vintage sounds, how about a little psychedelic big-beat bedlam in Tipsy Flower and Perfect Blue? That ought to trigger your Future Sound Of London receptors. Also, Suborbital reminds me of an old, obscure Steve Porter prog cut (Innerpulse), which I have to assume is just a coincidence.

Even though it's the obligatory 'chill' disc, CD1 contains some serious body movin' beats. That can only mean CD2 is gonna' tear things out, right? Eh, it's definitely more upbeat, though still hovering a dozen BPMs lower than Lieb's classic stuff. I also don't find this disc quite as interesting as the first, contemporary 'peak time' tech-trance with vintage Lieb flourishes. It has its moments, but after awhile, I start itching for a little Black Album business. Now that's some mainroom techno that'll scare the kids away!

Plaid - The Digging Remedy

Warp Records: 2016

The challenge with starting up a discography collection of long-running acts is figuring out where to start. Do you nab the agreed-upon classics first, then work your way down, with probable diminishing returns? Go in chronological order, from uncertain, interesting beginnings, through peak seminal works, then trudge through a long run of average material? Maybe go about it in an unconventional manner, say alphabetical order! But nay, most gather albums dependant upon two factors: availability and affordability. And it just so happens that the most available and the most affordable are either the newer albums, and the classics (thanks, re-issues!). Oh, and that one mid-career dog LP no one ever speaks of, found in every used shop and discount bin. Every legacy act has one of those in their catalogue.

Anyhow, Plaid, a duo I'm finally digging deeper with, as there's only so far one can go with Handley and Turner's Black Dog works. Under this moniker, they've released ten albums, two soundtracks, a couple collaborative projects, and who knows how many singles (The Lord That Knows All claims seventeen). Having only dabbled with their post-Dog music, I was stumped on which albums I should have if I want to become a Plaid fan. The fact they don't really follow conventional album traditions hasn't made things easier, most LPs looking like scatterings of whatever they're making at a given time, themes and concepts be damned. Thus I felt the blind purchase was best, gathering up whatever was most affordable and letting the London lads hit me for all they're worth, preconceived notions be damned. So if you're looking for a proper retrospective of Plaid's career, I dunno, instead ask that Wonky Angle guy to do it.

Of what I splurged on, alphabetical stipulation states I must review The Digging Remedy first, which also happens to be their most recent offering. Aw, now y'all expect me to review this in context with their greater discography, and here I am with no frame of reference.

Actually, I can say The Digging Remedy is exactly the sort of Plaid album I was expecting from a recent effort. Contemporary, but eclectic enough that it doesn't fit in any era. Lots of stylistic jumping, tunes mostly hovering around the three-to-four minute mark, a clear sense of producers comfortable with their tools and trade, showing little fear or restraint in exploring whatever sound they wish. An opener that has something of a John Carpenter vibe going for it? Sure things. CLOCK featuring big, super-stuttery chord stabs and dreamy melodies. Yeah, guy. A funky shuffle with The Bee? Shuffle away, boys. Something dubsteppy for the braindancers in Yu Mountain? I'll buy that. Treading back to techno's domain in Saladore? Let me get my robot on. A twee, acoustic ditty for a closer? No problem.

So The Digging Remedy delivered, but for thoughts on how it holds up compared to older material, check back later in the summer. Should have gotten to Not For Threes by then.

Curve - Doppelgänger

Anxious Records/3 Loop Music: 1992/2017

(A Patreon Request from Omskbird)

Though it's among the most mundane of critical platitudes, often repeated when digging around for associated info and insight into Curve's debut album Doppelgänger, I can't help but fall lock-step with it. So here it is, the quote emblazoned on promo stickers and adoring liner notes: “These guys were really ahead the 'curve', man!” Like, if I didn't know this came out in the early '90s, I'd have sworn it was a release from around the 'electronica' boom. Tunes like Already Yours and Fait Accompli could have rubbed shoulders with Republica and Orgy on compilations, while Horror Head might have appeared on a trendy, low-budget hacker thriller soundtrack. Toni Halliday could have paired up with a progressive house producer for a hit sing- no, wait, she did do that, with Paul van Dyk.

The music here does defy much of what rock was doing at the time though, such that they invented a whole new term for it. Fortunately, a couple other bands like Chapterhouse were doing similar things with ultra-dense effects pedals, so it was undeniable a new genre was being birthed. Yet despite getting lumped in with the nascent 'shoegaze' scene, Curve stood out from the pack, a rougher, noisier edge to their ethereal wall-of-sound, with grinding basslines and mechanical rhythms suggesting more an association with industrial rock (itself still developing). Throw in Ms. Halliday slightly Gothic look (that eye-shadow!), and it's no surprise the band might have fit snuggly within that scene too. But wait, all that distortion! Might they have also been grunge as well? No, no, the 'danceable' beats totally makes them part of the 'Madchester' brigade. Urgh, why you no easily fit anywhere, Curve?

Naturally, an album this seminal could only receive a super-deluxe double-CD re-issue for its 25th Anniversary, and 3 Loop Music doesn't hold back. Not only do you get the original ten-track album, but a pile of associated singles sprung from it, plus the original three EPs leading up to it (Blindfold, Frozen, Cherry), a couple live cuts, their obscure cover of the disco classic I Feel Love, and a bonus Aphex Twin remix of the track Falling Free! And by remix, I of course mean a standard On EP era track, with some of Toni's ethereal singing used as a pad. I think even his Jesus Jones remix retained more of the original. Ooh, there's another band I can't help thinking of while playing back Doppelgänger, though I'm certain folks would hate that comparison.

I'm kinda' beating around the bush with song specifics, because this 2CD package is honestly overkill. Curve's sound is neat and unique, but after two-plus hours of it with little variation, it all mushes into my head like an industrial shoegaze sonic soup. Sandpit offers a nice pure-ethereal respite, and the Blindfold EP material provides a quirky look at Curve's development (rapping!), but twenty- three songs (and an Aphex bonus) is just too much for one sitting. Needs more spacing for a full appreciation.

Carbon Based Lifeforms - Derelicts

Blood Music: 2017

Nope, this is still too weird to me, my brain still unsure what to make of Carbon Based Lifeforms being part of the Blood Music family. Leaving Ultimae Records, that's fine. It was clear Misters Segerstad and Hedberg weren't gonna' mesh with Aes Dana's shift into dub techno, so finding alternative outlets was inevitable. Maybe they'd follow Asura to the Altar Records camps, perhaps get chummy with another growing ambient techno print (Carpe Sonum, Databloem), or remain completely independent with their own digital Leftfield Records. The allure of vinyl out on the market though, it's just too much to ignore, and if any Scandinavian label has proven itself as the go-to distributor of niche vinyl, it's Blood Music. What I wouldn't give, though, to be a fly on the wall (a gremlin in the inter-tubes?) to hear the sales pitch on this particular marriage. “Oh yes, what your death metal label really needs is an acid-chill space ambient act – it'll totally bring in those lucrative psy-trance kids!”

Still, this new deal at least gave us re-issues of their old material, plus a whole brand new LP, their first in half a decade! (not counting some score work for the movie Refuge) Where might CBL's muse have drifted since the pure space drone of Twentythree? So many tantalizing paths they may have taken since, perhaps adopting trendier sounds like Ultimae and Silent Season's dub techno indulgences. Or maybe they'd explore completely new territory, venturing into the realms of shoegaze chill! I mean, they are technically on a rock label now, so it would fit.

Nah, guy. If anything Derelicts sounds like exactly what it is, a new album on a new label giving a potential new audience a general overview of their established style. It's a safe album in the Carbon Based Lifeforms discography, sticking to what's always worked best for them – downbeat songcraft, subtle acid, spacey pads, moving melodies – with a couple fresh ideas that even the eldest of fans can enjoy. Right, there's no MOS 6581 on here, but at least a little Potosynthesis. Really though, Derelicts has me thinking an album where Interloper and Twentythree were fused together – the immediacy of the former, and the spaced-out ambience of the latter.

Tracks like Accede, Derelicts, Equilibrium, Dodecahedron do the downbeat acid-chill thing, while 780 Days and Loss Aversion go for the wide-screen crescendos. Elsewhere, Nattväsen works another twee, spritely fairy-tale chill tune, complete with the requisite innocent-yet-creepy British child dialog. Mixed among them are plenty of pure ambient pieces, all still vibing on that Twentythree space drone, and mostly presented in tasty four-to-six minutes portions. If you need more though, closer Everwave is fourteen minutes of proper ambient bliss, so don't say CBL doesn't hook you up with the proper shit, yo'.

Dan and Johannes may not have evolved much with Derelicts, but it's still a fine album, their style intact and unique from much else out there. Especially on Blood Music. Blood Music...!

Quantum - Darktech

Werkstatt Recordings: 2014

Here we go again. A Werkstatt Recordings release featuring an artist with this as their lone entry at Lord Discogs, and no bio to speak of. It's starting to feel like sifting through long-forgotten goa trance compilations on ultra-obscure French labels containing a pile of one-offs barely anyone's even aware existed. Or maybe I'm just feeling that way given the nature of this particular item, but it's astounding how many dead-ends I've met finding things out about artists released under the Werkstatt banner. I mean, hey, nice of them giving all these unknowns a little extra promotional buzz beyond whatever Soundcloud and Bandcamp tags provide (d'em stickers, yo'!), but surely both parties could be a little more involved than this? Is it some Millennial thing I'm not aware of, online music makers flaunting any and all traditional modes of distribution and PR? Hey, I'm hip, I'm game to the Streamstep and Cloudcore play.

Fortunately, there's a little more info regarding this Quantum fellow in other outlets, including confirming it is a dude we're dealing with here. No doubt about the sex this time out, the associated iconography featuring a menacing Predator-like creature in shadow, its skeletal features illuminated by kinetic neon light. It's like something straight out of psy-trance's playbook, which makes sense as Mr. Rasmussen freely admits to cribbing ideas from that scene and incorporating them with the trendier new hotness of synthwave. It makes for a weird hybrid I haven't heard before, though edges just enough into the psy side of things I'm surprised Werkstatt picked this up at all. Like, isn't their whole modus operani reviving any and all '80s sounds and vibes, from industrial to synth-pop to EBM to space-synth? What's a decidedly '90s genre doing here? Gotta' corner every niche these days.

Actually, Darktech isn't retro in either a '90s or '80s fashion. Yeah, it features the same style of chugging, 'outrun' rhythm synthwavers love indulging, but Quantum does it in a real gritty, vicious darksynth manner – has Blood Music heard this guy yet? There's also ample sprinklings of the half-step 'metal-thrash' bridge dudes like Perturbator are always doing, which keeps things in the realm of synthwave, I guess. Like, if this was a real psy-trance project, those bridges would have been triplets. Aside from that though, everything else has me thinking psy-trance, from the screaming leads, to the chaotic bridges, to the trippy arps. Hell, I'm even willing to cautiously inch towards calling Worldeater aggrotech, that semi-existent '90s sub-genre of industrial that got all comfy with techno. It's certainly noisy enough to fit the vibe

I'm sure there's some micro-nano-yocto sub-genre of the psy scene that would claim singular ownership of Quantum's stylistic fusion (it's called 'psy-synth', isn't it... *sigh*), which really, really, really makes me want to tap out on all that nonsense. Mr. Rasmussen's just made some nifty tunes with a unique identity that can fit in either camp. It isn't necessary to create a lone island for every style.

Plunderphonic - Plunderphonic

Mystery Tape Laboratory: 1989

(A Patreon Request)

It's not every decade that a conceptual album title so perfectly encapsulates a new genre of music that it's forever attributed to it ...but enough about Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music For Airports. We're here to read my typed words regarding Plunderphonic, the seminal album from John Oswald that took the concept of sampling into strange new realms.

These aren't remixes or pilfered breaks or the stitching of uncleared sources into something entirely new, oh no. Mr. Oswald's aim was re-contextualize existing and familiar music such that you could still easily recognize the source, but be thrown just askew enough that it sounds warped and twisted from the author's original intent. As you can imagine, this was highly dodgy where copyright was concerned, but John never intended to make a single dime out of the project, giving copies away freely to radio stations, libraries, and passing gents. Even that wasn't good enough for the Canadian Recording Industry Association though, forcing him to destroy any copies he had on his person or face being sued into oblivion. Thus, original CD copies of this album now fetch stupid prices on the collector's market, which kinda' defeats Mr. Oswald's intent, doesn't it.

Another key gimmick/challenge/stylistic-choice John placed upon himself in crafting these tracks was to only use material recorded by a given artist in each piece. For instance, opener Beatles only uses The Big Chord that ended their song A Day In The Life (plus some fanfare chords). Dab tape-splices and edits Michael Jackson's Bad (in case the cheeky cover-art didn't give it away). Don't pilfers Elvis Presley's Don't Be Cruel. Net cribs snippets off of Metallica's And Justice For All (and sounds like a really complex math-metal tune in the process – I wonder if anyone's tried performing this live?). Spring plays about with Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring (for a composition that induced a riot when it premiered, it sure does receive love from unconventional sources). Brown gets ultra-meta in raiding Public Enemy's raiding of James Brown. As should be clear, no genre or scene was safe from Oswald's interest, everything from any era fair game for plunder.

Which is all interesting to hear, especially for trainspotters and studio rats. Does it actually sound good though, or does Oswald's incessant cutting, splicing, and layering render tunes intimately familiar into weird nonsense? Eh, depends on what you want out of this. Why settle for a herky-jerky mess in Birth when you can hear The Beatles original Birthday instead – oh, isn't it cool how manipulated it sounds though? I don't know anything about the jazz originals Mirror gets its stuff from, but to my ears, it don't come off much different than the actual nonsensical improv free-jazz gets up to on the regular. Still, d'at ambient drone of Rainbow!

There's fun bits and pieces in Plunderphonic, but ultimately comes off as John Oswald intended : an exercise in abstract studio artistry, with familiar music as the painter's palette. Goodness, how pretentious.

Fantastisizer - The Dark Sun

Werkstatt Recordings: 2013

And another one of these! Is this just something that comes with the synthwave scene, where anonymity is a currency as with early dubstep? Not like I have much of a leg to stand on here. I've been on the interwebs for over two decades now, and would like to think I've maintained at least a semi-anonymous presence. You can find pictures and details about myself if you really want to look for them, but I haven't plastered them all over the place for all to see either. If music had been a stronger calling for my muse than writing though, would I still walk this shadowy path through the Information Super-Highway (wow, there's a callback)?

I suppose it would matter just how successful I'd become. A forgotten single or two, who cares where it came from, but if it was even a minor hit, someone would at least be looking at Lord Discogs for additional info. How many details would I want shared, then? Full name and bio? A third-person essay? Just some scrub nonsense? All these Soundcloud kids and Bandcamp bands may not be ready for the limelight that is Discogs Famous, preferring their real lives unintruded upon. Not every amateur producer needs their musical upbringing splayed out. Some just had a few softsynths at their disposal, cranked out a couple tunes on a lark, and happened to get noticed by a digital label who's quality control has no lower limit. It's a tale as old as time.

Fantastisizer's tunes are nicely crafted synthwave tunes though – I wouldn't have sprung for the bulk pack deal from Werkstatt Recordings including it if I thought otherwise. And of course, there's absolutely no additional information of who this is, where they're from, and all that good stuff us 'music critics' are supposed to detail. I suppose if I wanted to do some actual 'journalism', I might use an email and contact Fantastisizer personally, but what if they prefer this anonymity? They (he? she? I kinda' wanna go with 'she' for a change – why should every electronic producer be assumed a 'he'?) does have a Soundcloud and Facebook page that hasn't been updated in a few years, so dead ends there. Even 'her' Bandcamp offers a mere two additional releases before calling it quits in late 2014 [EDIT: Spotify also has an additional track dated 2017, so not abandoned after all]. Either that, or whoever was behind the Fantastisizer alias (gads, do my fingers ever trip over each other typing that name) moved onto another project, though this one isn't outright obscure. At least a couple dozen folks have snagged up tunes from Fantastiszer – the 'name your price' price don't hurt.

Four tunes make up The Dark Sun, all of which doing that slightly chipper synthwave stylee with twee synths and moody rhythms. There's almost a trance vibe to some of these, especially Before Dawn, which I didn't expect. When something's titled The Dark Sun, it ain't the obvious feels you usually get.

Michael Mantra - D#m / Gm

Purple Soil: 2008

Much of Michael Mantra's career was fairly typical as most egg-headed ambient/New Age composers went. Releasing material via ultra-rare tapes on his own label, occasionally popping his head out of obscurity for a compilation track or two, and generally minding his own business honing his craft with little care for fame and fortune. Maybe he'd receive a nice shout-out from one of the ambient journals of the day, but I doubt tapes like Sworn To The Bell and RNA – Ribonucleic Ambience were getting much attention. He did release one notable album, Sonic Alter on the American ambient print Silent, but for the most of the '90s, that looked to be Mr. Mantra's lone brush with success.

After a while, Michael paired with a producer named Rod Modell, the two collaborating on a couple LPs. You know Mr. Modell as DeepChord, and he even did a remix album of Sonic Alter under the guise before folks knew much about him. This gave Mr. Mantra a little associated buzz, and soon his works were getting unearthed for a new generation of ambient heads. Even Silent Season got in on the act! Man, that's wild. I'd seen the name 'Michael Mantra' here and there, but never made the DeepChord or Silent Season connection. Having now taken in a little more of the man's drone-scapes, the association does makes sense. This particular album comes care of Purple Soil though, a Czech print releasing material about as glacial slow as the frigid forms from which Mantra took inspiration in crafting these pieces of minimalist drone.

Yes, we're back in these waters again, ambient so subtle and minute that it'd have Geir Jenssen hoping for a little more action. His is a meditative sort of drone, the likes I've touched upon before (The Eternal Om springs to mind – the inlay even has a similar 'do not play while operating automobiles' warning), and is almost impossible to detail in any useful sense. I'll still give it the ol' college-try for sure, but if I don't make it back alive, tell my loved ones- never mind.

D#m is forty minutes long, and has around a half-dozen sounds coming and going throughout its runtime. There's the distant breath of wind through alpine cirques, something like bird-song slowed and stretched into weird abstraction, an even subtler drone tone than the wind that gradually changes pitch over dozens of minutes, and that's it. I cannot deny I'm strangely entranced by it all, like I must pay astute attention to even the most impalpable of changes to get the proper experience of this composition. Forty minutes is a bit much though, my mind often conking out somewhere past twenty-five. At a 'tighter' thirty-three minutes, Gm has a little more going for it, in that it isn't so impossibly quiet, with field recordings stretched out as a distant tone resembling an om chant emerges. A real 'reach for the laser' anthem compared to D#m, this one.

Kriistal Ann - Cultural Bleeding

Wave Records: 2015

Kriistal Ann can't remain in synth obscurity. I'm sure experts in coldwave scenes or darkwave scenes or 4AD scenes could point to '80s talents that exuded pure Gothic charm and dread, tut-tutting that Ms. Michailidou isn't anything new. Maybe so, but in our contemporary times, such music remains ultra-fringe. Hearing any vocalist with such distinct flair is even rarer, thus how can Kriistal not leap out of a black-n-white YouTube video like the spectre from The Ring, dragging you into some pagan autumn ritual by graveyards and cathedrals.

I feel like it's only a matter of time before a major label exec comes sniffing around the Werkstatt Recordings offices, hearing upon the easterly winds of a dark muse surrounding herself with undeniably low-grade production standards. They won't care that it's part of the music's appeal, the bare, brittle rhythms and out-of-tune synth strings adding to the cold, Gothic aesthetic Ms. Michailidou has crafted into her own fiefdom. They'll ignore the fact she's already four solo albums deep with the Greek print, not to mention her work with label head Toxic Razor in Paradox Obscur and Resistance Of Independent Music, plus François Ducarn in Sine Silex. All they'll see is a female talent generating some underground buzz, ripe for exploitation if they can just mould her to fit their schemes. Yeah, good luck with that – save a sudden revival of The Crow or The Craft franchises, this brand of ultra electro-Goth ain't generating dollars anytime soon. And even if it could, studio-sleeking it up will only ruin that which makes it so intriguing in the first place. We don't want our coldwave sounding so fresh and so clean - it's gotta' be deep in the muck and dirt, making you writhe with the worms. Wait, why am I talking like I'm some expert on this scene? I've barely dipped a pinkie toe into these icy, black ponds reflecting pale moonlight.

Anyhow, Cultural Bleeding is Kriistal Ann's third album, and her only solo outing not released by Werkstatt. Oh no, my ridiculous scenario came true! Heh, no, this was put out by Wave Records, a Brazilian outfit. How they came into contact with a Greek synth/cold/dark/industrial peddling the same sort of sound, I haven't a clue – Hell, I didn't even know Brazil had such a scene going for it!

The material on Cultural Bleeding is slightly better produced than her outings on Werkstatt, but not drastically so. There's still the bleak atmospherics, claustrophobic electro rhythms, and grand Gothic, operatic words of Kriistal's voice, selling lyrics like “This is the end of things; Now at least, I know the truth”, and “Once more an ancient tragic, bard recall; In boldness of design surpassing all”, and “Je fais le deuil d'une fleur; Repousses le sort; Et te dis lalala”. There's even a track sung in ancient Greek, Αντιγόνη! It honestly makes about as much sense as her broken English to my ears, but Kriistal doesn't sound any less entrancing in the language.

Marnie - Crystal World

Les Disques Du Crépuscule: 2013

This is what I mean. Just look at this cover! I know that's Helen Marnie posing there, a somewhat sultry glance your way with latex (rubber?) leggings propped high against the wall. It's something I can easily see a fly-by-night pop starlet do, but the lead singer of Ladytron? The band that's maintained a stoic aesthetic no matter what era of their existence (including that Yo Gabba Gabba! guest spot ...yes, really!). My brain has a difficult time processing it, adjusting to a Ms. Marnie that didn't know could exist. Like, was she always lurking there all along, but didn't want to upset the Ladytron apple cart in all these years? Had she not fallen in with those synth dorks, might Helen have taken a stab at a solo album much earlier in her career? Would such a solo career have led her to retro synth music just the same, or might she have been lured elsewhere, like Brit-pop bollocks? Eh, I can't imagine that, no matter what twisted time-line we find ourselves in. Her muse definitely seems fixated on the ethereal synth-pop of 4AD lore.

Besides, if you squint your ears enough, Crystal World isn't that far removed from the roads Ladytron had been travelling up to that point. She already has fellow 'Tron member Daniel Hunt helping her out in the studio, so really Ms. Marnie's debut solo is like a Ladytron album, just without the other lady or the guy who adds much of the 'tron' to the sound. A slickly produced and polished record, then, retaining much of the songwriting but unencumbered by ultra-retro analog synth noises. Now now, not everyone's a fan of modular Moogs.

Thus the album opens with a sweeping ethereal cry, building upon soft synths and rhythms thick with '80s reverb. Marnie finally drops some poetic nuggets about being The Hunter, and oh man oh man am I ever getting Clannad flashes here – the band, not the anime. Damn, the Irish synth-folk group is even fronted by a lass named Máire Ní Bhraonáin. Too much coincidence for one brain to handle, mang!

Crystal World isn't a total throwback though, production more contemporary than even Ladytron's output typically is. We Are The Sea features a sludgy electro-pop beat, while tracks like High Road, Violet Affair and Submariner touch upon the indie scene's fascination with '60 dream pop. Heck, Submariner sounds like something off Gorillaz' Plastic Beach.

In fact, there's a lot of familiar songwriting on here, melodies that you'll swear you've heard elsewhere (dear God, is Sugarland ever driving me crazy that way). That's not to say Marnie's style-biting, as she owns every piece of music she sings and crafts here. There's just little in the way of challenging synth-pop on hand, Helen more focused on the lyrical content of her work. And hoo, do I ever get swept away by her voice, but then I did even when she sang about mundane things like taking girls to movies. No blame.