Cubicolor – Falling

Amnesty continues next week, but we’ll wrap up this week with colorful rain rolling down your windows.

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[6.50]Will Adams: Is dance music that you can’t really dance to fundamentally flawed? This time last year, I spilled my guts about my long and enduring relationship with dance music. Something I barely touched on was the fact that so much of my listening occurred when I wasn’t dancing: completing schoolwork, writing, running, laying on my bed only wanting to relax. I still listen this way, and I still rack my brain asking why I connect so much with it despite rarely connecting it within its stated context. This is why acts like Cubicolor or Moderat or Trentemøller — who toe the line between music with a pulse that’s also melancholic, as if almost afraid to dance — fascinate me so much. “Falling” is the most dancey song from its album, yet its percussion hits like rain patter on panes, the energy more akin to wistfully contemplating lava lamp flows. It was an energy I already loved, but halfway through was when it clicked. Tim Digby-Bell launches up an octave, the synths begin to cascade, and we continue in a forlorn deep house space. It gives me the access to dance music that my introversion prevents me from extracting in club settings; I hear “falling like you ever did fall” and feel able to give myself to the music without moving a muscle. Even lying on the floor, I feel the pulse.
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Ryo Miyauchi: The sparse, prickly signals and Tim Digby-Bell’s half-awake moaning give me an impression of Thom Yorke. He repeatedly sings pessimism into his computer like him too. Lucky for him, the digital void actually sings back, rendering his words about “these waves never reach the shore” null. I want him to keep singing so it echoes back more delightful tunes. And though his words remain the same, Digby-Bell kinda sounds well off by the end than he did before he heard the machine chirp back.
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Alfred Soto: Because we can’t close the year without a bored-sad male robot mumbling bored-sad robot feelings over electric piano and a Mr. Coffee beat that Junior Boys would have rejected.
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Iain Mew: I love the digital rain feel of the production, and the way it suggests beautiful downcast mood as a force of nature. The vocals stick a bit close to Radiohead to be as remarkable, but if ever there was ever a line for something going up against the feel of the last few years of mainstream dance music, “these waves never reach the shore” is it.
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Ramzi Awn: It’s really pretty. It’s the perfect melody. I have heard it all before. But it’s not bad. And those synths!
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Tim de Reuse: The Radiohead comparisons are apt, mostly because Digby-Bell’s moan is unambiguously Thom Yorkian. The star of the show, though, is the stylish, effortlessly in-vogue production, which stays soft and tickly in all the right places at it swells into a restrained but still satisfying close. I think in the wrong hands this tune could have very, very easily ended up a slog, because the mood is already pretty somber without those downer vocals and the lyrics (representative line: “Sleeping like it’s never never enough”) are just lethargic. It makes up for all that by virtue of knowing exactly how much groove and sparkle it takes to keep the eyes open without breaking character, and, well, being just damn pretty to listen to.
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