You’d be hard pressed to find a more civilian sounding album than this. [las vegas] plays like a reified traffic-stop and suburban-crawl dreamscape. This is a trip down the road to Target to pick up a new book you’ve only heard good things about. Only pleasure here. No stress of missing a turn or that acrid smoke from the pick-up in front of you turning your eyes red & fiend-like. A real feel-good minimal techno record with beats and textures that’ll make your shoulders shimmy like Kevin Durant.
There are a few nondescript tracks on this one that don’t share the genre-bending leaps into godspace that the highlights have. Filler tracks? Maybe. Record label sanctions? Perhaps. I’ll just stick to the highlights down below.
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“Elvism” catches you emerging from a community pool like a mermaid seductress a la the hottie from Christmas Vacation. The intro sounds like underwater steel drums played by the current itself. The groovy bass comes through about a minute in to get you moving before pebbles start getting skipped across a liquid quartz lagoon in some pastel porcelain cave. Keep in mind these tracks are abstract and so will this review be.
“Flesh & Bleed” fires in next sounding like a cosmic laser gun fight. Dueling green and red sonic blasts firing from 50’s atomic age pistols trade shots to open the cacophony of bouncy blasts that is this song. This is an interesting track in that the drums and melody are sometimes indiscernible lending hand to an encompassing single layer of rhythm and texture. Really groovy beats on this one.
(image via Doc Atomic’s Attic of Astounding Artifacts)
Next is “Twelve Miles High” coming in at an amusingly dissatisfying eleven minutes and thirty seconds. I may have lied about this album being a totally stress-free exploration of suburbia. This track is tense. Familiar American storefronts and contemporary townhouses are now Bauhaus quadrangles and Brutalist bureau monoliths. Things are intensely neutral and an indistinct paranoia begs you not to talk to anyone. Good track though.
Personal favorite “The Jealous Guy From Memphis” is on the tail end of the album. This track just builds and builds and builds. Every measure adds one more nuance, one more subtlety. Excitement mounts itself like a Neumann pancake stack. An intense headspace of comforting civilian feeling, no images really come to mind with the subdued piano riffs growing like an overdue volcano. The drums just slap concrete floors from long range and you’re fine with it. Only justice, only pleasure.
Great for getting work done, great for a solo drive through your neighborhood. Minimal techno without a droning sense of doom. Masterful production working as texture – This is [las vegas] from 1998.
Electronique Critique 