Very much looking forward to picking up the Soft Pink Truth LP. Their PromoFunk EP would have been in my top 10 of last year, if I'd had the alacrity to compile one. I certainly wouldn't have got it on the strength of it being a Matmos offshoot- but it's so much more than that n'est-ce-pas? I won't go into the music from a perspective of history/influence here in any depth, see Marcello's masterful portrait, however I've a couple of musical observations.
What singles it out to my mind is it's compositional strength. There's nothing "tracky" or haphazard here and maybe that's what people identify as being 80s-Retro about it, beyond the clear hallmarks. It has abandoned the minimal drift characterising 78% of Dance Music since Phuture's Acid Trax. We get 10 ideas here not 2. The four pieces on PromoFunk are built of distinct blocks of harmony and dissonance, (Pink) Lego Bricks in base multiples of four, buttressed together with a real flair for musical structure - we have intros and codas, chorus and verse, point and counterpoint . At first you struggle to get the logic, but soon you're hanging on the changes, waiting for that gorgeous bassline to kick in again. It reminds me of my coveted Black Dog 12"s and their elaborate structures, which seemed almost quaint at the time.
To add a slightly less hyperbolic twist I would also say one thing. Despite the fact that the Matmos boys have almost perfectly (deliberately, cleverly, temporarily?) camoflagued themselves as a Dance "Act", my excitement for the EP was mildly tempered by hearing it wedged amongst other "Pink and Purple" tracks on a tape I compiled for the wife before Christmas. It has a slight lack of that elusive quality "Fatness", (BASS!, mid-range generosity, breadth, swagger, whatever), even on the 12" format, which may mark it as an Indie endeavour (like, who cares?). This was distinctly audible when pitched against something like Roqui's "I've just begun to Love you". Maybe Arthur Russell met with similar remarks?
Posted by Woebot at February 3, 2003 12:17 PM