We're looking to the year 3010 this week on TSC, showcasing a clutch of singles set to soundtrack the rocketfuel-drenched exploration of futuro-primitive landscapes for future plutonium mines and Total Recall-like colonization. Strap on your space helmet and buckle up, it's a right vicious ride once you get past Venus.
At the top of the order this week we've got the debut solo single from New Collapse drummer (then known by the nom de plume of Rich Bitch) Frank Alpine, the Night Tripper EP on DAIS. The eponymous A-Side is a throbbing, textural melange of dark synth melodies and sci-fi FX laid atop a skittering-yet-minimal rhythm that may or may not be fashioned by corpse hands. What's perhaps most intriguing about his solo work are the odd pop quirks that bubble just below the surface, like a whiff of melody that will seep through a blast of Maurizio Bianchi-like filter fuzz, or how something so cloyingly claustrophobic can be so damned catchy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Alpine's a disciple of John Carpenter's futuro horror soundtrack work, and nowhere is that more prevalent than on the spilled molasses creep of B-Side “Another Land”, which sounds tailor-made for an epic chase scene through perilous banks of mist and fog. Limited to just 300 copies, but still available through the label last time we checked.
Generally everything you read here is carefully mapped out on the floor in front of the turntable 37 seconds before we start writing the column, but you can file our next selection in the “delightfully unexpected” category. While sending over another album for review, White Denim honcho Matt Korvette also included a copy of the self-titled 7″ of his own Right Thant project, which, we found so enjoyable, we felt it warranted its own column space. For those of you who don't know, Korvette is, perhaps most famously, the mildly psychotic lead singer of Pissed Jeans, the knowledge of which makes the sleek-yet-burbling electro oscillations and hushed, spoken murmur of Right Thant that much more surprising. A-Side “He Wants to Meet Me” is an exceedingly dry industrial scrap anthem, pulsing on dry-as-a-bone synths and a slowed/pitched down vocal harangue that gives it a more menacing flavor. On the flipside, “City Lament” is the minimal-synth successor to (Pissed Jeans') “The Jogger”, with Korvette ruminating (in a harrowing deadpan) on all the disgusting aspects of urban living in a post-Pottery Barn wasteland filled with too much coffee and too little imagination. These are only available direct from the label when you purchase $10 or more in records, so make sure to ask for on whilst you are there grabbing the Native Cats and Private Entertainment singles.
Last out of the box this week we've got the debut single from Baltimore's one-man synth destructor Death Domain, “Toxoplama Gondii” b/w “Vampyroteuthis Infernalis” & “Watching From My Window” on Army of Bad Luck. Simultaneously obsessed with arcane medical terminology, non-dance music and vampire lore, Adam Stroupe (formerly of ATL synth-wavers S.I.D.S.) here concocts three coldwave minimal-synth jams filled with android intrigue and bloodless thrills. “Toxoplams Gondii” and “Vampyrotheuthis Infernallis” both race with an utterly inhuman pulse; like being touched by the cold, dead hand of a zombi(e) supervillain. Conversely, the
