Consumer Electronics

Consumer Electronics - Airless Space
Harbinger Sound. Harbinger 200. CD/2LP




With the prospect of quiet solo Saturday night ahead of me I decided to spend it taking in the new Consumer Electronics long player. After visiting the wine cellar and making a suitable choice for the evening I pressed play and settled down to what the fuck was I thinking of? This is ridiculous. After four tracks I couldn’t take it no more and turned it off. Taking a long slug of what turned out to be a rather sumptuous Gewurtztraminer I began digging around for an Art Garfunkel album whilst cupping my ears to check for damage. I’d made the mistake of taking Consumer Electronics lightly. You don’t do quiet nights in with Consumer Electronics. You have to prepare yourself. Its like inviting the Stasi round for tea. Is it one lump or two and excuse the mess, we’ve been busy hiding the typewriter. Oh shit.

Philip Best says that he thinks this is the best Consumer Electronics release to date and there’s me thinking that Consumer Electronics previous outing Dollhouse Songs [also on Harbinger] was that perfect amalgam of disquiet and bang up to date late 2000 and teens electric fear and loathing. What impresses most during playback of Airless Space is that Best is probably right. Consumer Electronics go from strength to strength. While his previous partner in chime Mr Bennett fleshes out his CV with almost danceable tosh we take pride in the the fact that one of the original purveyors of Power Electronics [now aided by Sarah Froelich and Russell Haswell] still manages to create songs that are a rusty dagger to your guts.       

Its the twin prong attack that gets you. Best delivering his lines with malevolent relish while Froelich does her best to rupture her vocal chords. Hers is a delivery capable of reducing nuns to tears. They ease you in, if thats ever the right phrase, with a vocal track each. Each track built around a stripped down beat, each track equally unsettling. On the opener ‘Body Mistakes’ Froelich’s deranged vocal delivery gradually dissolves into a sea of digital static while on next track ‘Carnage Mechanics’ Best delivers his spoken word lyrics in an increasingly fevered state while reveling in his favourite subjects; self harm, drug abuse, emotional instability, exhibitionism, war zones, death, sex ...

'Would you act differently if the cameras were off?'

As the beat morosely and relentlessly thuds on.

The thirteen minute long ‘Murder of JJ’ has Best’s vocal coming at you as out of the ether, as a ghost, a cipher with an accentuated emphasis on each word, again the spine is a relentless dull thud beat and when Froelich emerges she’s singing about ‘living down here with the dogs’ and then Best comes in and the pair of them are delivering the weirdest of harmonies as Best goes to the floor frothing at the mouth singing ‘its love and light and its forever’. In some ways it could be a love song.

Sitting through an hours worth of such derangement is like sharing a therapy session with a group of emotionally damaged people charged with making music out of broken synthesizers. Its like reading a repulsive book thats doesn’t make much sense but which you find morbidly fascinating. Its like putting your hand in to a dark hole and feeling something cold, mushy and wet. Unsettling is the word that keeps coming to mind and I’m all for that.

Russell Haswell’s production gives Airless Space exactly that but within that vacuum lies a dark malignant growth that no amount of Alsace’s finest could ever make cheery. Some people just like it that way.

This release is Harbinger Sounds 200th and as such deserves a special mention. Let us all raise a well charged glass in Mr. Underwood's general direction.

[If you can please do buy the double album so as to get the lyric sheet. This will enable you to not only follow the lyrics with your finger but to better understand the inner workings of the Best/Froelich partnership].