There’s a whole sonic aesthetic that’s everywhere now. A kind of ghost of the Eighties, or maybe a throwback to a cocaine-comedown Eighties: the kind of deluxe digital uncanny you can hear in records like Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night, weirder Eurythmics songs or Dennis Edwards and Siedah Garrett’s “Don’t Look Any Further”. It first got resurrected in 2000s “glo-fi”, “chillwave” and “hypnagogic pop”, was perfected by Dave Okumu in his production for Jessie Ware’s 2012 Devotion and seems to have filtered from there all the way through general pop all the way up to Harry Styles and Taylor Swift.
It’s here in bucketsful, too. Not to say that Australian DJ/producer Samantha Poulter aka Logic1000 is in any way using a diffusion line version of the sound: her production is too expert and intentional to merely adopt something zeitgeisty. Rather she has a clear understanding of it as it’s grown into a particular 21st century language for expressing melancholy or dissociation. In particular, the one-two centrepiece of this album – “The Only One” with Christine & The Queens in Kate Bush-ish mood followed by “2Love” with Moroccan-Canadian singer Fauzia – is one of the loveliest uses of the aesthetic to build something still-modernist, haunting and truly moving.
Poulter brings in other electronic ghosts to her mix, too. There’s familiar elements of leftfield house music, synth disco and trip hop throughout, and “Sparkle” does something incredible with the pop-trance of the late Nineties, bringing out the narcotic dissociation and deep sadness in its endless glide. At its best the effect is exquisite: nostalgia and futurist dreams reflecting off one another, the emotional effect powerful if never quite explicable. That inscrutability is tricky, though, as the album progresses it gets harder to feel a binding personality to it. But even if certain parts glance off you, it’s worth digging in, because when Poulter’s distinctive sound-world comes together the effect is devastatingly great.
Listen to "The Only One (ft. Christine and the Queens)":
