Genre of the Day - Electroclash
Album of the Day - Nite Versions by Soulwax (2005)
If you haven’t heard, it’s a ‘brat summer.’ Like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a massive neon-green square hit the music world last month, seemingly growing larger every day since its release. As much as it represented a watershed moment for Charli XCX and her posse’s influence on the last decade of pop, the album’s bratty, electronic abrasiveness and moments of dead-eyed-deadpan vocal delivery recalls the simmering presence of indie sleaze’s figurehead musical genre—-electroclash.
I’m bending the reality of chronological order here a bit, as electroclash’s visible peak actually predates indie sleaze by a few years. Nonetheless, electroclash’s sonic style and aesthetic movement makes a comeback every decade or so. By the late 1990s, house and techno were far from new sounds and EDM was perceived to be moving towards oversaturation and diluted. Certain producers began to gravitate towards dirtier, heavier sounds. The early ‘80s was distant enough for the colors of its underground art scenes and New Wave to shine bright and crystalline, and it informed the sonic and aesthetic basis of electroclash’s confrontation with the dance zeitgeist.
The clash in electroclash largely comes from a tension between the amount of time devoted to the buzzing, unrestrained synths and biting New Wave instrumentation dominating and the sardonic minimalism and repetitiveness of the lyrics. Germany seems to often find itself at the forefront of electronic dance oddities and developments, and it was producer DJ Hell who both pioneered the sound and gathered many of the artists working in the space of fusing two integral ‘80s sounds and attitudes under one label. Electroclash was unrestrained, unapologetically trashy, experimental, and women artists like Peaches found freedom in its DIY nature that harkened back to the magical early ‘80s boom of personal synthesizers. Visual elements and fashion were king in the scene as a true homage to New Wave’s vivid wildness with particular inspiration drawn from the film Liquid Sky, a kaleidoscopic and deranged punk-alien-drug epic. Sonically, the genre squared between early techno and Italo-disco robotism, blown-up synth distortion, and punky & New Wave overtones in guitar elements and rawness. Electroclash inevitably blew up in the clubs of all the global fashion capitals and became an indie media darling for its rough boldness and contrast with the dance establishment during its short initial run, and has been prized among devotees ever since. At its core, it makes the dancers rock out, and the rockers dance.
Today’s album follows shortly after the peak of electroclash by Belgian duo Soulwax. The monochromatic simplicity of the album cover might remind you of an album mentioned earlier, the single color cleverly reflecting the spare lyrical moments like “E-Talking” and its repetition of the half-apology, half-robocall-explanation “It’s not you / It’s the e-talking” over ceiling-high synths and vicious drumming. “Compute” points to a Yellow Magic Orchestra-esque bleep-bloopy influence with acid house bass running under the surface. The album is a screwy sonic textural feast, like the mashing together of droning synth distortion and thick bass guitar of “Miserable Girl” that seems to take the piss out of the scene’s potential pompousness. It’s a reminder that while the early ‘80s are long gone, zany, colorful makeup and post-punk energy can always be bridged to new electronic experimentation to exhilarating results.
"Brat Summer"? My fictional superhero character The Brat will be pleased to know that.