Nostalgia Deathstar : They Kill The Flame
(State Of Bass)
CD | LP | Bandcamp
Our Score
Nostalgia are a beautiful contradiction very much on their own terms. Their album of hypnotic electronic music embraces a future that they critique with a steely narrative that deconstructs the Trump era kaos with a nostalgia for an age yet to come. You can also dance to its melancholic Bladerunner beats.
Sean Albiez and Martin James are veteran digital wizards dealing in an idiosyncratic decades long adventure into sound that is rooted in the post punk free for all of electronic pioneers like Cabaret Voltaire and the Mute Records early TVOD of dark electronic pop. This soundtrack journey of metal machine music went through the second great cultural revolution of our times, acid house and its many post rave journeys to land in the laptop present with an album of stark soundscapes. The captivating musical chassis is a stark contrast with the lyrics that deal with a stark post sci world in crisis that is no fictional future shock but a bleak take on the reality of the age of stupid and corporate power grabs that have brainwashed into the zombie now.
Using the tools of destruction of the Bond villain Musk and his PayPal droogs against the machine, the electronic music duo have made an album of ambient electro that you can dance to but paints minor key dark energy soundscapes that are both captivating and melancholic. It’s an album that is politely angry with dark sinister vocals that instead of shouting with a punk frustration at the end of everything soundtrack deal a death disco apocalypse with a dark pop that nods at DAF or sometimes the jagged anthems of the Prodigy. By blending electropop, post-punk, and industrial sounds with biting, often socio-political lyrics in a frontier pop, Nostalgia Deathstar are the secret soundtrack to the angry inteligensia – the smart folk who refuse to dumb down and look on appalled at the chaotic carnage of the now and have nowhere to articulate their intellectual angst apart from the dance floor.
This transmission is not so much dancing to the radio as dancing to the freak show with a pulsating tech of a future utilising a bottom line of great songs for the shamanic tech wizards to carve sound and create art as both a mirror and as a hammer.
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