If rock and electronic music in their separate forms haven’t produced anything challenging or worthy of admiration lately, then the same can be said of the basic mixture of both. Following the fever for synth and guitar combos, the genre waved goodbye to its creativity and adopted a formula – and due to the excessive number of people using this formula, its charm, predictably, had pretty much gone.
Luckily, there are some bands that like to constantly test new sounds and (thankfully) take their music to planes yet unexplored. Whilst some are isolating the pop idea in the name of experimentation, others have taken it as just a starting point to try to discover and create a way of re-writing Pop. Using the same synths and guitars, they’re achieving something that few artists can claim: a unique sound.
Late of the Pier arose from the same wave that brought us the Klaxons (along with a thousand other generic bands); New Rave, which then returned to haunt them all when less than a year later, when they were asked to offer up something more than just a lively celebration of futuristic makeup. As it wasn’t (and shouldn’t be) the goal of many of these projects to do so, lots of them have simply been dying off as soon as their musical ‘genre’ began to drown in the eyes of the media; creating dozen of new one (micro) hit wonders. However, for every single released – five so far – Late of the Pier set themselves apart by their creativity and the way they have manufactured and produced their own brand of strange yet somehow equally danceable hits.
Produced by the ubiquitous Erol Alkan (Mystery Jets/Long Blondes), the debut of the four-piece from Castle Donington shows that between 13 tracks (including the hidden “Very Wav Wet Wipes”), there is room for everything (from Queen, Black Sabbath, Brian Eno and Gary Numan to new rave, new wave, 70s rock, grunge and Brit-rock), and that somehow they manage to do this without ever leaving this somewhat rainbow spectrum that makes up their identity. And if the opening track Hot Blues Tent is reminiscent of when guitars sounded epic because they were made to be heard in stadiums, then Broken follows the same road, making said guitars dance between climate pads and psychedelic riffs. At the end of the track, the synthetic lines are chopped and processed in the dramatic, but still fun, proposals of Space And The Woods, enough to make Devo and A-ha blush at its creation.
African percussion and lazy synths accompany the tasty feel of The Bears Are Coming until it hits its rocker break. Then the music moves to an 8-bit attack filled with claustrophobic screams. Heartbeat starts off by showing how the new wave was supposed to sound in 2008; with groove bass dominating until 70s sounding guitars steal the scene while the chorus (“The heartbeat, the flicker, the line”) is repeated to exhaustion in a nonsense mantra. Focker closes the triad in an epically electronic way with distorted, almost zombie-like vocals, preceding a great battle of synthesizers that put Hot Chip’s Shake a Fist to shame.
The rocker side of the album goes far from the meaningless chords that most bands champion nowadays. The Enemy Are The Future starts timidly, with a low voice until the moment that a Freddie Mercury appears through the punk shouts of Samuel Eastgate to emerge not long after in an electronic broth. Whitesnake again deceives with its delicate beginning, but it’s one of the heavier tracks on the album. It’s also hard to define; sounding somewhat like electronic grunge pounded together with Brit-rock.
Bathroom Gurgle finishes the blistering 42 minutes of the album, casting a darker shadow on the dancefloor with it’s mutant synths that sometimes recall Metronomy and sometimes A-ha. Psychedelia again reigns supreme accompanied by the – now typical – electronic break that changed the whole face of the music forever when it first emerged.
Working their unique mixture of dance and psychedelia, Late of the Pier ignored the death of the scene that conceived them by seeking a stronger identity between conflicting influences. Sometimes to create a good pop record in a world full of copy/pastes, you must dive amongst the strangest shit to come back with something unprecedented, and because they did it we can proudly call their release the weirdest and coolest album that new rave never gave birth to (Zarcorp, 2008).
