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Es | A Love Cycle

CD, Fonal

Tekst: TJ Hatton

Publicatiedatum: 09 april 2001

This second long player from Finnish duo Es gave me a mildly unsettling hallucinatory experience. For the first 45 seconds of listening, I was convinced that my CD player had inexplicably devolved into a rickety 1950s turntable. Fortunately for my sanity, the accompanying literature from Fonal Records explained that the main source of sound for this album was derived from three turntables bought for ten dollars a piece. If economic frugality is an indicator of artistic merit, then no doubt Radiohead's next offering will be based around a cheese grater, an empty packet of crisps, and elastic bands of varying lengths stretched across a tissue box, and all purchased for the princely sum of two pounds fifty. Indeed, this album is so lo-fi, with vinyl static prevalent throughout, it makes early Sebadoh recordings sound like Whitney Houston. It all harks back to the tape loop experiments of the early 70s, when visionaries such as Fripp and Eno were busy creating similar soundscapes. However, as was the case then, a loop only goes so far, and the five tracks on offer here are similarly limited by their formulaic nature. Alarm bells immediately start ringing when the song titles themselves are more evocative than the songs. A case in point is 'She Puts Out the Fire in Her Heart with Her Tears'. In reality, the track itself is redolent of nothing more than emotional anaesthesia. The human touch is all too lacking, with track two being the only exception, where a woman's wordless singing imbues the track with a haunting quality it would otherwise lack. Track three's undulating rhythm faintly echoes the hypnotic tribal drum patterns of Jon Hassell's superior 'Delta Rain Dream'. Yet the only complete success here is track four, the snappily dubbed 'Twenty-Five Twenty-Five', with its opening piano motif, 70s synth noises, and chugging bassline. At just under three minutes, it remains engaging throughout. It's unfortunate the remaining tracks suffer from varying degrees of sonic flatulence. In all fairness this Finnish duo are clearly not lacking in ideas, yet their album serves as a prime example of the medium hampering the message. As a mixed-up Tina Turner might be inclined to say: "Love: What's a cycle got to do with it?"

http://www.kindamuzik.net/recensie/es/a-love-cycle/266/
Meer Es op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/es