Just got this from melody maker...
Global Communication
76:14
Dedicated DED013/10 tks/76 mins/FP
"THERE are times when writing about music seems like a pretty dumb
occupation. Isn't the appeal of our favorite art form precisely the fact
that to describe it is invariably to reduce it? So, you find yourself
wondering why, week after week, we're brightening up your lives by musing
over what we had for breakfast, the limitations of the five-man midfield,
a colleague's recent navel transplant (a great success, thank you for
asking), working them into unseemly metaphors for what we're listening to.
It's all to avoid the main issue: what the f*** does it sound like?
Hey, you know, it's tough, the irony being that the better the record, the
tougher it gets. Most of the time we struggle through regardless. Every
now and then, though, one of us wanders unwittingly into a genuine,
no-win, reviewer's nightmare situation. An album about which there is
nothing to be said. An album that's so good that prose just seems to
skitter across its surface like oil on water.
"76:14" is such a work.
How good is it? well, how tight is a duck's arse? And who are Global
Communication when they're at home, anyway? They are, in fact, Mark and
Tom from Reload, whose majestic (an over-used word but appropriate in this
case) "Le Soleil Et La Mer" from the "Auto-Reload" EP was probably the
single most audaciously brilliant electronic tune of last year - and there
were many contenders.
"76:14", then, is hard to talk about. There's no subterfuge, no gimmickry,
nothing to mark it out as anything new or radical. It's pure rhythm and
painfully evocative melody, each serving the other with the grace and
elegance of a choir of angels. Why is it so beautiful? Why does it seem to
say so much despite the facts that it's been made with machines and that
there are no lyrics anywhere? I don't know. Perhaps it's something to do
with the free reign of imagination, with the trust GC are prepared to
place in us, the listeners, in our ability to be seduced rather than
beckoned. To give you some kind of bearings, if The Orb are the Pink Floyd
of post-acid electronica, then Global Communication are The Byrds. There's
really nothing more to be said. Thank heavens."
ANDREW SMITH - Melody Maker.
B
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