Seven Tracks, thirty seven minutes long – ‘Worthwhile’ is the debut album from electronic trio RECOUP, whose name for blistering live shows is already well-documented. The stage shows are made possible via carefully crafted electronic drum triggers and loops, over which the live kit orchestrates the home-made samples.
Remodelling the sounds took months of intesive work, and are beautifully worked into the album to devastating effect – instantly making the record appropriately titled one.
This is techno - with a live feel, and a vocal. Songs flow over textures as the voice weaves in and out of a quality soundtrack, and you could really flow to this….
Deceptively the opening feel is almost incognito - the steady heartbeat of ‘Origins’ loosens up the body in readiness for dance rhythms - but what follows is a voyage through which the depth of the most simple things cannot be underestimated.
‘Understand Me’ bounces to a heart beating rhythmic trance, but with that acid house vocal slowed right down, twisting and turning through life’s vortex and imploring you to delve deeper into the psyche. Splashes of snare and cymbals override Stadler’s looped drum sounds, and then the vocal plea precedes the beat being unleashed into a wide open space before it mashes up all over. The drums lock the whole thing down again with a broken beat and though there are seconds spent at cruise control, the respite is short-lived.
The breakbeat picks up again in the surging, thumping ‘Thunderground’ amidst acid textured pulse-emitting techno and once again the mind and body are filled with a high stimulus urge to lose themselves. Cracking tune after cracking tune unfolds, the music is strong and Theron’s probing voice has a perfect vehicle in it.
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‘Don’t Delay’s spitting, misfiring stop-start throws confusion into the mix as the ambient glow soaks over it and gives it coherence, a lifeline. The album unfolds beautifully and with more than a hint of chronology about it, through ‘Worthwhile’ with its foghorn-warped, ambient opening - all twisted FX until the live drums suddenly kick in, taking the track higher, faster. Then it is just the strong, skipping beat, the vocal, the pulse and you throwing underwater shapes as the thing pours out of the speakers and washes right over you.
Good dance music doesn’t even try to bang-bang-bang its way into your head. It can absorb you, get inside you, pull apart your psyche, and put it all together again correctly so that you are wired only for the rhythm and the pulse and in full celebration of life, simple pleasures, sunshine, music, trees, the sky and the sea. This superb effort closes like a runaway ticking clock counting down the seconds you have left to live, and then slowing down to resemble helicopter blades(or a wobble-board recorded and played back at a fraction of the speed). There is closure, you are placed gently back to where you were, glowing all over, and smiling.
It was one hell of a listen!
www.myspace.com/ReCoup
www.ReCoupmusic.com
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