All We Hear Is Radio Gagarin

I've been looking at lots of fine art over the past week. It seems to me that if you only had old masters ot judge by, you'd soon reach the conclusion that the Dutch are the ugliest people in the world by several orders of magnitude.


SPACE HEROES OF THE PEOPLE – DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE EP

The great thing about Space Heroes Of The People was always the delicate sense of balance. In their music organic live rhythms circled sequenced synth tones warily, thumping tech-tribal simplicity sat facing musical eloquence in an eternal blinking contest. When they lost live drummer Lizz last year we wondered how they’d fill the gap without toppling the precarious Jenga edifice of their music, and the answer is they’ve not bothered..

They’ve gloriously, wonderfully, inspirationally just done bugger all. Whilst the live show might be bolstered by what old thespians might call some business with a floor tom and Wii remote, on record they’ve simply turned up the keyboards, robotised the vocals are further 20% and made the songs even more linear than before. Jo Edge’s basslines chug along ineluctably like a perpetual motion machine built by the SNCF and the synths buzz with regimental fury like massed Stasi bees. On EP highpoint “Engineers” they deal with the fact that the song is a deliriously self-parodic vocodered Numan chant by…changing to German half way through. Talk about making peace with the cliches of the genre. This isn’t so much setting out your stall, as jumping all over it covered in tin foil shouting “Bloop bloop I’m a cyborg”.

Although the vocoder does weigh slightly heavily on the record, and we wish that Tim Day would let a little more of his natural voice onto the music, this EP is inane and ridiculous, but absolutely fantastic. “Skylon” threatens to morph into Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” (albeit without the faux-existential histrionics), “The Modernist Disco” is the record’s low point, but it still manages to sound like 90s trancers Gat Décor remixing some harpsichord heavy 60s spy theme for Jean-Michel Jarre’s garden party, and “Mr Atomic” is a cybernetic mantra that sounds like an early Underworld tune with the buzzer from Catchphrase sprinkled liberally over the top, which can only mean electro-nirvana.

Thirty years ago music like this sounded like the icy steel of a bleak future; ten years ago we listened to it with charmed retro-condescension; now we finally have enough distance from the birth of synth pop and industrial dance to realise that this band is simply fucking ace, now, then or in eons to come. It’s good, and it is right.