Above the City –
Club 8
The delicate pop music of Club 8 has historically met the
expectations that befit a Swedish two-piece.
The albums and individual songs are consistently stylish, quite sexy,
formed out of too little material stretched a bit too far, and not well suited
to spending an entire day within.
And then all of sudden here we are: 2013, 17
years and 8 albums into what now must be totaled up as a terrifically
improbable career—still in progress. Band
members Karolina Komstedt and Johan Angergård have once again spread a picnic blanket on a sun-dappled lawn. Songbirds chirp overhead. The
picnic basket contains a small Casio full of synthetic drum effects. Romance beckons, save for one important
difference this time around: on Club 8’s
latest Above the City, we are in for
a little less cuddling and a little more sex.
Ahem:
Fuck it, baby we’ve go nothing left
to prove,
Taking off our clothes is all that’s
left to do,
I was heading for the door,
To be on my way once more.
That chestnut
leads off fourth track, “Run,” but by this point in the album the band have
already spent quite a few minutes getting more serious than expected. Above
the City is not the easy-breezy fare of a typical Club 8 album.
First off the
album cover, which while maintaining a clean/European aesthetic veers
eyebrow-raisingly close to Radiohead-style dystopia-techno-fusionism. This is certainly not the usual Club 8 goofy
portraiture or pop art cover technique.
It is at the very least a bit more adult and a bit more engaging than
prior album art from the band. It
implies depth (or, um, height, as it were.)
For the first time in a few albums, the macro lens is off.
Secondly, the
title of track 1: “Kill Kill Kill.” And the song’s bludgeoning,
mortality-invoking pipe organ notes, akin to something you might hear in the cathedral
of a nightmare. “I always cared for
those who kill / now throw another life into this fire,” Karolina sings. Scratch the picnic, actually.
And so within a
few tracks of Above the City the listener
is tracing the narrow margin of technology, life and death and murder, and the
fate of the soul. This is no bikini to behold. Club 8 are the tour guides here, so
thankfully the technique isn’t entirely deconstructed to all hell (they write
hooks with the apparent ease of masters.)
But by track 3 “You Could Be Anybody,” we are well nigh the broken, undefended
borders of the spooky old Trip-hop dynasty.
Synthetic drums, myriad well-spaced clicks and rattles, ominous bass and
a vocal suspended weightlessly in the mix all recall the heyday of Massive
Attack—it could be a slightly-springier track from Mezzanine.
“Do you think it
hurts?” the narrator sings. “You could
be anybody / you could have anyone here / you could be anybody, anybody but
you.” If the organ from “Kill Kill Kill”
was a smiting force from the heavens, the elastic hum of “You Could Be Anybody”
is more of a sinister taunt, albeit still from somewhere above. We have swapped menace for menace.
Which brings us
to the Dream Academy/Paul Simon drum line boom and invitation to naked release of
“Run” noted several paragraphs ago. A
little later after “taking off our clothes:”
“I just want to run away / my heart is beating but then again I took the
wrong way, I drifted far away.” This is
much closer to classic-era Club 8, and is a welcome relief after the Death
Alarm sirens of the first several tracks.
After a
relatively character-free, nonmusical “Interlude” track 5, the band keep the
lighter fare coming by mimeographing a page from the Mary Onettes’ Guide to
2013 and making for the beach. “Hot Sun”
and “A Small Piece of Heaven” paint blue skies Above the City. The narrator makes for the coast in the first
of these tracks and laments a need to return home in the even sunnier follow
up. We reach a point of fulminant escapism by track
7, “I’m Not Gonna Grow Old:” channeling whom one must channel when attempting
to invoke a youthful devotion to release and immortality. Madonna and Cyndi Lauper have joined us on
the lawn.
The synthesizer strings, bounce and bad grammar of “I’m Not
Gonna Grow Old” are vintage 1983-84, and with apologies to Ms. Lauper it is
quite obviously Club 8 who now want to be the ones to walk in the sun. After the darkened despair of tracks 1-3, you
can’t blame them. And you don’t want to,
because this track, complete with its “Invisible Touch” background crescendos
of fake drums and “whoa oh oh-oh” vocals, is pretty great.
(And yes, that is two bands on Labrador who have celebrated
2013 by gleefully celebrating 1983. The
label catalog should be embroidered in sequins.)
This is a lot of ground to traverse in the span of one
clever album by a two-piece band on an indie label. Where do we end up? Club 8 seem to have written two denouements,
actually, and there is substantial appeal to both of them. The first time through to an appropriate end,
on track 12 “Travel,” the narrator arrives home to the quiet sound of an
isolated organ melody (a striking contrast to “Kill Kill Kill,”) and a few
different ethereal background vocals, all of which combine to suggest a
haunting-in-progress, believable after what has transpired earlier in the album: “I traveled far / I am nowhere near / Anywhere
I intended to go.” Later : “So I won’t try to go on / I’m thinking here
is nothing left to be done.”
The alternative ending is a bit brighter and substantially
bigger. “Less Than Love” boasts the
hugest and best hook of all the hooks on Above
the City and does so around the tipped dart of a lyric, “Less than love: I belong here.” It is at once uplifting and resigned: a wounded triumph. Again, after an album like this one, it feels
well-chosen as well as well-crafted.
Which brings us to the chief misstep of Above the City. Actual
closer, “Straight as an Arrow,” feels woefully out of place. There is another too-big-for-comfort world-y
sounding chorus, but this time no helpful link to much of anything that came
before. This song is out-of-sequence,
and possibly could have been filed somewhere earlier in the album or saved for
a b-side to some lucky single release.
It just doesn’t fit.
Neither, for that matter, do the instrumentals and interludes,
of which are three. They represent a lot of
artistic license for a pop album, and quite clearly too much. Structurally,
there is always going to be something inherently thin about building a
gigantic-sounding album out of two musicians and a bunch of electronic
tools. Still-lifers shouldn’t paint
battle scenes; short story writers shouldn’t pen epics. The
interlude tracks cast this guideline in sharp relief.
There is a bit of the same mission creep feeling to most of Above the City. It is a problem when the sweet and the sinister parts of the album
taste saccharine. Nevertheless, the
effect arching rainbow-like above the entire city of this album is that of
melody, which is everywhere, in every song.
Club 8 sound pretty, always, and this time out, again.
Keepers 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14
