In my world of synth I have a constant dilemma with myself. There is a real knack to being able to draw from something that sounds irreversibly like 1982 and yet make it fresh and exciting. How is this achieved? Well, I will tell you something for nothing, it’s not by middle aged geeks in denial and let loose on the internet. No, the only way for it to be cool is if the exponents are young, and talented, and driven, and creative.
Step forward Promenade Cinema.
This album has been a fair time coming, and all the single releases that have preceded it have pointed to something special in the offing. The opening track ‘As The World Stops Revolving’ is what many of us first heard from the Sheffield duo, but it never stops sounding like one of the best things recorded in recent memory. A cacophony of sweeping synths and strings that you imagine being an eternal backdrop to industrial dreams of those that feed off nostalgia.
And this is the real crux of my point. Maybe the same music recorded by those that were the current age of Promenade Cinema back in the early 80s should be equally as hailed, but there really is something more exhilarating about hearing it from people that are very much the here and now.
Quite often across the album we hear the perfect vocal blend of both Dorian and Emma, and this lends to its charm. Beautifully produced, with a touch of edge here and there, I hate using phrases like ‘darkwave’ or whatever this is supposed to be in a marketing sense, to me it’s infectious music that makes me glad that electronic music is alive and well in the present day.
Cassette Conversations is the stand out track from those songs previously unreleased, but really I would invest the time to hear the whole lot.
8/10
