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Dusted Reviews
Artist: Losoul Album: Care Label: Playhouse Review date: Jun. 17, 2009 |
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A smiling, American voice audibly reflects, “Ah, today seems different...it feels like we’re going to have a quiet, uneventful, peaceful day,” a herring red enough it immediately smells fishy. This proclamation leads in album No. 3 from Germany’s Losoul (Peter Kremeir). It’s titled Care perhaps to invoke both its tightly-calibrated efficiency and exuberant hospitality. Kremeir’s compositions are stripped down to clanging rhythms and tactile timbres with plenty of movement (much of it stealth) and little time for melodious airs.
The first track, “Slightly,” loops that opening picturesque sentence (one of many snippets of notably Yank-accented commentators strewn album-wide) into a warped cycle. Eventually, individual words get lopped off and the refrain is crumbled down to a manic, sonorous chew. Peeping horns, a muss of steel-drum and greasy tone-wipes accent the crackling bob. Though the rest of Care isn’t quite this unabashedly jovial, (except maybe for, oddly enough, the cod-grotesqueries of “The Lords of Insanity”), one senses Kremier builds tracks with a grin instead of a frown. Even when the mood darkens, such as in the stalk-tempered “Vacuum Stances,” there’s something in Kremier’s odd-shaped syncopations, often just shy of a skip, and his inclination for splotches of vivid color that make it all seem not so dour.
Honed-in and hard-driven, Care wobbly ambles through the gridlock of four-by-four mechanics. “Deuce” has a steely resolve, and a matching iron-ore palette, as it slinks on the sparsest of throbs, a clenched hi-hat shushing a driplet pulse. But the percussive voice cut-ups lend it a faint body-rock boisterousness. Like much of the album, it’s a chrome skeleton emitting human warmth.
With no vocals this time around, Kremier sticks to scrutinizing lockstep variations and tonal elasticity. The dearth of hooks don’t quite make it mnml, but there’s certainly some surgical incisiveness to Kreimer’s sequencing. He still glances sideways to jazz for novel shadings, like the elegant scroll of brass that spirals through “The Crush,” but for the most part, Care is unrepentantly out-of-place – which makes it is as timeless as dance music probably gets these days.
By Bernardo Rondeau
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View all articles by Bernardo Rondeau