LOW-RES

2023 is the year that features the return of ‘goth’: that splintered, spectacular abstraction from punk’s post-78 debris that in its sartorial separateness from the high-street-cheating copycat consumers still stands out from the crowd, the blank masses (continue to) stand agape, gawpses in their mouths.

Not that this experimental subculture ever truly disappeared or went (back) underground, like all progressive forms it spread its stylistic wings and infiltrated popular consciousness in ways still unknown to the unwitting clothes-clones wrapped in (and warped by) the bland uniforms of conformity. The Primark © of the beast.

2023 also sees further retrospective texts: there are no less than three books out to commemorate the scene(s). John Robb’s ‘The Art of Darkness’; Cathi Unsworth’s ‘Season of the Witch’ and ex-Cure man Lol Tolhurst’s ‘Goth: A History’.

To augment and supplement this welcome renaissance come Swedish twosome Low-Res with the follow-up to 201’s ‘Varför’’, the soni-companion text ‘Därför’. Measuring the heart of the beat and treasuring the beat of the heart these eleven tracks blend the elementals of some of the above with pristine post-punk panache with added (d)electro-dreampop sprinkled delicately into the mix(ture). Drink the elixir and expand.

Gloom-glam opener, the sublime ‘Stigma’ (featuring Audionom’s Johan Hinders) is spindly, spacious, spidery, salutatory in the chilled vein of The Cure and/or Echo and the Bunnymen. Its skittering beats and bleeps scorch the skin, melt the mem-brains and pierce the perceptive pressure points. Boundaries are pushed, quandaries are hushed.

‘Spirit’ melds a motorik pulse with voices emanating from eerie shadows, a synth-labyrinth entrancing and seducing the sense-abilities. Yulia Bizyukova adds ethereal ladytronics (sic) on the OMD-rived ‘Coral’, pure propulsive pop-art.

Industrial pop music for the tech-illogical age.