Y'know how wooden formwork applies a woodgrain texture to concrete? The image adorns this album from Brisbane's Michael Hogg aka Low Key Operations, an architect by trade. Nature/nurture, romantic/modern, form/function, it's an album long on concepts short on musical depth
I'm most persuaded in the harder mid-section, with the earlier tracks, which should stand alone, giving me ingratiating melodies and muddy, polite, IDM-typecast drums. Ironically Black Lung's remix shows the way, taking the strongest track, ‘Reinforced’, and chucking in a warmly welcome bass distortion and radically tweaked breakdowns. If this is Hogg's state-of-the-art address on architecture, it's a woolly 60s morality novel world where the built environment is mere wallpaper in an emotional fridge.
It's track eleven before the crunch and swell of analogue vs. digital that so distinguishes the work of Two Lone Swordsmen for example, comes to the plate. Indeed ‘Coloured Existence’, along with ‘Trauline’, ‘Dove Grey’ and the aforementioned ‘Reinforced’ are solid tracks with a fine interplay of digital and analogue, signal and noise, peanut butter and jam. But they are too few scattered too late in an unconvincing set. I'm sure Low Key Operations are capable of better. And the logo is too much like that of the Dead Kennedys.
Jonothan Sykes |
