"A club on the moon. Glass dance floor constructed over a massive crater. Below, millions of infinity glow sticks blare. Space-age fashion back in style. Pink drinks that fizz blue. Covered by a plasma dome that reflects lights that flicker along the walls. SDF taking the stage in pure disco-king mode. Keeping that consistent kick for movement. Synths that soar along the cosmos of clouds and stars. Enough noir to get a little moody, but still keeping that dance going. Vocals that build from 90s ballad-rock, consumer cold-wave, and house-MC. A little booth in the corner that reads Psykick Dancehall Recordings almost selling out of their cassette, Alana. And yes, cassettes play on the moon."
C Monster · October 25, 2017
Tiny Mix Tapes
"This collective of UK musicians (including Adam Parkinson, aka Dane Law) make eerily brilliant electronic pop music, nabbing tropes from across the second half of the 20th century. It’s a crucible of disco, synth pop, madchester, house, industrial music and new wave, fronted with the Mark Hollis-like vocal presence of Oliver Marchant. The songwriting and arrangement is brilliantly simple, deploying big fat wads of melody-groovy drum machine rhythms into bleak construction sites of reverb. They stretch out too, like on the nine-minute repeat-heavy ‘My Friend David Don't Need Rubber’, a coda of late-night hip shakes and keyboard pulses. ‘Dancefloor Baby 17’ tells a story of a dancefloor encounter, the lead singer in a “rancid trance” as he hobbles about the place. It’s a mix of chilled out Detroit claps and hi-hat loops with the frontman’s almost Jarvis Cocker-esque storytelling over the verses. The entirety of Alana feels like the group are collectively exhausting some pent-up pressure, realising dreams of leading busy dancefloors and arenas of adoring synth-pop heads, but it’s all a joy. They seem pretty self-aware (‘Stroke for Stroke’ could either be about wanking or pissing in public… either way it sounds like a bit of a giggle), but it doesn’t detract from the quality of their tunes or those addictive beats. This is party music you can either cry or have a laugh to, depending on your mood"
Tristan Bath - November 27th
The Quietus
SDF – Alana (Psykick Dancehall) Cassette and digital album
My goodness! Pure avant-pop from this collective of ruddy beet-makers.
My headphones don’t often get the chance to delve into such bass-heavy electronic frequencies. And this is all ‘boom-tish’ and square-waved bass poke. Cor!
Recorded in a bamboo-themed nightclub in a Liverpool basement (circa 1987) these are real songs with real backing vocals and weighty lyrics. ‘Stroke for Stroke’ seems to be about coke or wanking or perhaps coke and wanking.
The digital coughs that introduce ‘My Friend David Don’t Need Rubber’ and dry narration suggest a Storm Bugs vibe but this is as sleazy as casually shrugged off linen trousers.
The erratic tom-tom programming dominates ‘The Fight’, so the swaddled synth wash becomes a sulphurous base note. It’s heavy without being metallic. Yet compare this with the gum-popping airiness of ‘4 Men’ as sparkly as Kraftwerk’s ‘Neon Lights’. Two very different visions of the teenage disaster!
It’s not all senseless ecstatic joy though. Closer ‘All Night Disco’ seems to ram Paul Young’s fretless bass sound into a pre-rave serotonin dump. The heavily reverb-ed snare sounds echo round the abandoned dancehall. The last few revellers slumped into human pyramids realise that cold daylight is breaking outside and the dream of temporary release is well and truly over.
The trick SDF pull of is to deal in a rare surface deepness – a delicate trick of the light when the glitterball’s beam hits the chipped Formica.
Joe Murray
Get ALANA here.
