Oh how we chuckled at Casey Fischer and Warren Spooner when they first appeared as seemingly the only members of the short lived (blinked and you missed it) electroclash scene. The combination of deeply pretentious art posturing and fairly poor electronic music was not an appealing one and, after an initial burst of interest, we rapidly moved onto something else.
Yet here they are, making a return both unexpected and unexpectedly quite good. The musical premise remains very much the same – real instruments have still been left at home – but this time they appear to have spent a bit less time planning their next art installation and put more effort into writing a few tunes. The very fact that Linda Perry is their main collaborator is no better indication of the new Fischerspooner manifesto.
So far so good. Then you remember that there’s a press release with the album, with the band’s guide to each track. Oh. You see, these aren’t just a handful of nice synth pop songs, they are in fact a meeting of the orchestral mellotron rock of the Moody Blues with Stooges-like proto-punk, a tribute to the dance rock of AC/DC, a goth update of Simon & Garfunkel and timeless rock via Philip Glass.
They’re not. It’s the sound of two blokes and some computers and it’s quite neat. Whether you can get past the fact that Fischer and Spooner are such prats is up to you.