There’s been a fair spate of 80s retro in recent years and not much of it has been worth the listen. Often the forced irony or the slavish dependency on nostalgia has limited the long-term appeal of the efforts or there’s been a whiff of desperation in the mix as if the retro arrangement has been employed to disguise the inherent uselessness of the track.
Part of the problem also lies in the fact that the 80s means so many different things to music lovers of a certain age. Despite the dire clothes, the new moral wasteland of capitalism and the general air of disposability there was a shed-load of good music in the 80s and it’s difficult to think of a decade in popular music that can claim greater diversity. Just admire the bookends: in 1980 you have Joy Division’s ‘Closer’, Jim Carroll’s ‘Catholic Boy’ (recently re-lauded by MOJO) and Dexys ‘Searching For The Young Soul Rebels’ while in 1989 please be upstanding for The Stone Roses’ ‘The Stone Roses’, De La Soul’s ‘3 Feet High And Rising’ and New Order’s ‘Technique’.
In truth most people associate the 80s with ‘tinkly-bonk’, a well-known technical term (would I lie?) for the combination of electronic sound and drum patterns that under-pinned many of the more accessible and chart-bound forays into the previously uncharted territories of the micro-chipped synthesiser and sequencer.
And it’s from these particular ancestral waters that GLADKAZUKA emerges with his debut ‘PANAMENA’ EP. And for a change the quality of the retro music convinces, with GLADKAZUKA sounding like he means it. Undoubtedly its recaptured time is writ large, but he manages to infuse his tracks with a palpable empathy for the gasping ‘shock of the new’ that this music originally evoked.
|
He’s also helped by a natural affinity with the melodic and rhythmic possibilities that all those old bits of kit could create - and can still - as well as an ability to massage his output with a genial ambience (Orbital springs to mind) that smoothes some of the harder edges within the programmed sounds.
Perhaps his skill has been pre-determined by birth. Gregorio Gomez (aka GLADKAZUKA) is a young Columbian and, whilst not wishing to sound imperious, the comparative isolation of his background has maybe kept much of the original source materials untainted by the implicit dilution that comes with the blatant materialism of the Western world’s self congratulatory nostalgia industry. That and the fact that he’s a talented artist.
Whilst not backtracking in my assessment I can see many other 30 and 40 somethings disagreeing with me on this one. Yes, I too am guilty of a sense of nostalgia but I’ll stand by my belief that GLADKAZUKA does more than enough to place this musical offering squarely in the lap of Janus, determinedly rifling a definitive era in popular music’s history while keeping one eye on a way forward into the future.
www.sonic360.com
|
