Australia are hardly notorious for fielding successful leftfield electronic artists. In fact, I can’t name one. Not outside new spiky electro outfit, The Presets, anyway. True, our buzzin’, beeping, boopin’ love affair with the early eighties is nothing new. Fischerspooner, She Wants Revenge, Clear Static, Miss Kittin, Ladytron, Goldfrapp all heap on the Mode, the Order and the League in one way or another, and ‘Beams’ is really no different. In fact the resemblance to any of the above is there right down to the surreal Nu-Romanticism of the cover-art, the chaffing sexual jouissance, the cryptic death masks, the treated vocals, the bristling static and the amorphous piano tinkery. So let’s get this straight; we’re not building a new case here. We’re just furthering our investigations.
Whilst it’s the bevy of drone beats, and clipped geometry of Julian Hamilton’s dry, melancholic vocal that defines the album, attention might also be drawn to pop-savvy logic of the tunes themselves; the ‘Born Slippy’ hysteria of the cracking ‘Down Down Down’, the bleak, gothic romance of the sorrowful ‘Black Background’, the stuttering house trance of ‘Kitty In The Middle’, the elcetroclashing thrill of ‘Girl (You Chew My Mind Up)’, the cinematic industrial spread of ‘Hill Stuck’ and the something-nasty-in-the-nursery horror of the beautiful ‘Beams’.
An impressive debut, weighed down by the occasional ‘eighties’ tourism (‘Bad Up Your Betterness’) and the odd generic house-number (‘I Go Hard, I Go Home’) but worthy of your attention nonetheless.