No longer courting controversy with every song…
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[6.43]
Anthony Easton: This is just so ethereal, floating, with little authority, it fails to make arguments, but succeeds in making aesthetic strategies, which might be more exciting.
[9]
Alfred Soto: Rhythmically it doesn’t get going until the two-minute mark, during which frequency distortions adduce their avant-garde credentials, the smushed drums their Tricky-in’98 antecedents. If this turns your salivary glands into butter, play on.
[6]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: If “Satellites” lets us know of anything with its glitchdroney ominous intro, it’s that it’s fun to be scared of things. It’s certainly appealing to gesture towards the full array of hollowed-out industrial fuzz-drawling and various other Nineties mood-music peripherals. If this came out around the time I found out about disc one of The Fragile, EMA would have gone high-school platinum. Alas, “things ain’t coming out that well” as she sings. It’s occasionally fun to be poked at by a doom-monger too.
[7]
Jer Fairall: Evokes late-Cold War anxiety, but without ever finding its way towards making political into the personal. I’m still ready to nominate Erika M. Anderson as the Artist of the Decade on the strength of Past Life Martyred Saints — hell, on the strength of “California” — alone, but while this seethes and gnashes as much as the earlier record did, it never provides anything like its predecessor’s accompanying catharsis. If my disappointment is greater than my score suggests, consider it as an act of faith in the upcoming album.
[5]
Mallory O’Donnell: Actually it turns out that no matter how over-saturated your production, the sound of nothing happening for four minutes is still really fucking boring.
[3]
Brad Shoup: The first time I saw the trailer for Edge of Tomorrow, I was surprised. There was… singing! Turns out it’s some Paul van Dyk deal, whose original mix starts with these loud bass tones, same as “Satellites”, but not as lethal. There’s a battle going on between grandiosity and grotesquerie: elongated notes, tone-poem delivery and chamber instrumentation confront urban field recordings, melting radios and criminal drum mixing. It’s a supernova in reverse: fragments coalescing into a furious white dwarf, then stillness. Put this in previews.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: Apocalyptic nonsense shouted into a wind machine that’s caught the last person’s hair. What, that doesn’t sound amazing?
[8]