The 2kDozen 500: #154 - Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland, "Black Is Beautiful"

Finally! I've got this to listen to on Spotify. Since I missed the boat on that free stream just before it came out, I've being rueing the day; rueing it!

No track titles - but for a few like the opener "(Venice Dreamway)", which couples dreamy (if not stridently nightmarish) synth plunges with syncopated drum riffs and rattles and rimshots. I've been reading a bit about the drifting use of the word Lynchian in reviews of late. Repetition of random elements to breaking point here has me reaching for those kind of words again. "4" involves a truly creepy whisper of "This year/My year" over and over. It also ends with a slightly hissy nothingness, which is nice.

I have very few solid ideas about this too. I would say that are a meme, but that's a word I'm not fully confident that I've understood correctly; so I'll leave it in the box. "6" involves flute sounds and a very strange wet slash of a sound. "7" is a sentence in a long paragraph of Cabaret Voltaire or something like that. A couple of indolent stabs on the keys. "9" has that scary, low voice business, urging "Never look back" as liquid nostalgia ripples behind. Icy beat comes on and a strange Nathan Barley rhyme mutters over the top.

 "When white people tell other people they can't have sex they become teenage rebels" floats an out-of-context quote. I want to hear the rest of that conversation.

There's an air of the art installation, juxtapositions winking at the brim. And of bare bones and just getting on with it. "10" is like a dub version of something like Burial, studio tools being left in the van overnight. As it were. Loping siren noises with faint vocals echoing over the stop, singing something about "We believe". "11" sounds like it was recorded in the kitchen in the middle of the Rinse FM of the mind. The slightly coy vocals give it the feel of early post punk stuff like Young Marble Giants. Or a biscuit tin version of Portishead. Likewise "12" reshuffles early House handclaps into a new conglomeration with warbling synths.

"15" is the sound of Highlander with a hangover. Hanglover. The whole album is the sound of watching lots of TVs with very tired eyes and minds over and over until a beast steps out. Blank is Beautiful.

Rating: Pose out of Thunnnggeeee