- It appears that Berlin's The Goon Show are keeping their identities a secret for the moment, so I'll note only that one member has deep ties to Dial (no surprise there, given the Orphanear imprimatur) and the other has tended to work in the background, supporting one of electronic music's most distinctive voices both on stage and in the studio.
Voice is also the focal point in these two tracks on The Goon Show's debut release. On "Angel Band," it's a dusky falsetto wrapped in Elvis' Sun Sessions reverb and touched up with dub delay; there's a hint of both Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno on "The Grass," where the singer swoops up to the high notes like a bird perching on a wire. The Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan might be another reference point, though the voice here is meatier and more bodily. You can hear an echo of the JBs' approach to pop, generally speaking, in the harps and strings and faintly skipping beats of "The Grass," with its mixture of innocence and melancholy. (That may be a contradiction in terms, but that hasn't stopped plenty of Dial artists from successfully mining similar territory before.)
"Angel Band" is the more upbeat of the two tracks, with a shuffly, rolling beat you could imagine a DJ like Koze or Tobias Thomas using to shift energy gradually out of the warm-up hour; there's a hip-hop feel to its lurch and swing. The stand-up acoustic bass adds to the vintage feel, a natural fit for the singer's bluesy inflection, but the rest of the track sounds thoroughly modern, from the scrap of atonal guitar that slithers its way through the empty spaces to the chugga-chugga chords that puff up like nervous birds. File alongside Caribou's Virgo Four remix, and see if your audience can scratch its head and move its hips at the same time.
Tracklist A1 Acapella
A2 Angel Band(Dub)
B1 Angel Band(Original)
B2 The Grass