Aural Aggravation

Negative Gain Productions – 8th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It likely seems strange to anyone born in the last thirty years that electronic music as we know it simply wasn’t a thing at one point. If the Seventies saw a slow emergence of new technology in music, it wasn’t until the early 80s that that technology became accessible – that is to say, affordable and more widely available in commercial terms. This was truly revolutionary, and to hear bands like The Human League, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, all coming through in the charts felt like, well, the dawning of a new era. Which is precisely what it was, and this would evolve in darker directions – as well as dancier, poppier ones – as the decade progressed, and through the 90s, by which time the sense of revolution had become fully assimilated. No-one bealed about the lack of instruments involved in the making of the Utah Saints’ album.

You can see why your traditionalists hated it, of course, and the Musicians Union, too, and this friction did continue into the 90s: as they saw it, drum machines threatened to make drummers obsolete, and if you had a synthesiser which could do bass and lead, both bassists and guitarists would be out of work! It was of course pure knee-jerk, and one wonders to what extent the same is true of the outcry over AI, but on that score only time will tell. As it stands, history had proven that home taping didn’t kill music – no, that would come later with the advent of streaming, and not illegal streaming via Napster and subsequent P2P platforms like Gnutella and Soulseek.

This s the backdrop for the debut album for electronic rock duo, Sonum Unum. Signals From The Sun is, according to their bio, ‘heavily inspired by 80s and 90s eras electronic and synth-pop music. Dark and ominous tones, ambient textures and thumping beats abound while lush, layered vocals soar to epic and cinematic tiers.’

It’s tempting to slide into the easy commentary which maintains the narrative of this being an album with a retro vibe, primarily because it’s true: it’s an amalgamation of two decades of electropop slickly delivered to draw in elements from specific acts, but the entire oeuvre of the timespan, from bolder darker grooves of gothier European dark electro, but also incorporating elements of the emerging case sound, with the quickfire drum builds that pace the way for expansive choruses.

There are times where it feels as if their approach to appropriation – essentially pulping and compressing the very essence of the forms into smooth perfection – results in songs that are simply too generic to have a real sense of character or identity. But then, plough through myriad releases from that time span from acts who either bubbled under or who only had a hit or two, and you’ll find the same is true of the rest of the album tracks. Moreover, to return to the question of sounding ‘retro’ – it feels like an increasingly obsolete concept. More or less everything draws on something precursive, and most of what is starting to be a recycling of a recycling. It’s no longer a case of a seventies or eighties or nineties revival: all of these things now exist in perpetuity. Retro is the new contemporary, and I can’t decide of the seeping sadness I experience listening to it is because of the emotive quality of the songs – which are tightly crafted more than gripping, to the point that they slip past without for a second taking hold – or if it’s because of the way they evoke so much that entirely removed from the songs themselves.

Signals From The Sun is Mr Mister to Depeche Mode via Eurythmics and A-Ha and Nine Inch Nails and Bastille. Slick, anthemic, it seeps nostalgia and has immense commercial appeal if it finds its way to the right channels and outlets.

AA