Nick Giles’ recent review of BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa’s Big Shadow Montana linked the album’s moody, glowering atmosphere with the northern European winter. The same musicians, with the edition of everyone’s favourite classical modernist, Johann Johannsson and Peter Eyvindsson, produced Super Great Love. Maybe this Icelandic “supergroup” decamped to Ibiza, as this day-glo pastiche of Italo-disco moves, EBM textures and trance techno thumpers certainly belongs on that sunny party isle. Wrangling more synthesizers than your average minimal wave compilation, Evil Madness know how to manipulate the irony and cheese to maximal effect; coming up with an album that is incongruous to the predominant Editions Mego sound, and also to the expectations of this reviewer.
Described as the Travelling Wilburys of Icelandic electronic music in the press release, like that group of old stagers, (who managed to sound somewhat less than the sum of their parts) I kept wondering if it was possible for five men with such varied recording histories to make a sound so camp, derivative and well, fun. From the stolid beats and simple, poppy 80s synth lines running through “Divine Sensual Love Fantasy” to an Euro-disco take on the catalogue of 1990s UK label Pork Recordings, on “Isabelle Adjani”, the first six tracks roll out in one continuous saccharine sweet hands-in-the-air moment. “Maxim’s Goldfinger” stretches the formula out for an eleven-minute cosmic stomper, complete with Theremin, Daft Punk vibes and an imagined spy thriller narrative. The remainder of Super Great Love arpeggiates on by; with the metronomic tick of the snare, the pulse of the kick drum and the odd acidic flashback. Personally, I like my disco a touch more lopsided and queer, but if the thought of five Scandinavians channelling the spirit of late-period Kraftwerk, Hi-NRG and the less po-faced devotees of synthwave into an album for Editions Mego, then you may have struck gold of the stilton variety.
Oliver Laing
