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Album: The Big Pink, Future This (4AD)

Andy Gill
Friday 13 January 2012 01:00 GMT
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Naming your band after one of the all-time great albums is quite a yoke to saddle yourself with, and The Big Pink are making heavy weather of it on Future This.

Built around dense sample-collages and fizzy, swirling synths, Big Pink's sound is a strident goth-pop variant with vaunting, epic ambitions, and a shrill edge that recalls Perry Farrell. It's the kind of music that hides its inspiration behind sonic overkill, with sounds occupying

so much of the spectrum that there's precious little space for the listener to enter into it. There are signs, in tracks like "Rubbernecking" and "77", that a few decent songs may be lurking behind all the sonic detritus; but perhaps they ought to ditch the multitracks and get themselves a ukulele. Of course, if they truly believe, as they claim in "Jump Music", that "silence is torture", then all hope is probably lost.

DOWNLOAD THIS 77; Rubbernecking; The Palace

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