- If Sweat Sweat Sweat, the debut mini-LP by Germany's LX Sweat, promises anything, it's sleaze. You have its label Not Not Fun's description ("Steamy, disembodied bubble baths of endorphin slow-rides and pleasure crunk"). A cover depiction of a girl mid-shirt removal. And, finally, the video for "Touch Your Body," which prompted a commenter on the blog Nofearofpop to astutely observe: "if you [don't] look really cool you [shouldn't] make a music video with urself [sic] for 3 min.. loved the music but daaaaaaayum he took sleazy to the next level." The young producer is clearly a product of his time, as his primary motifs—chopped & screwed R&B and warped-cassette late-night infomercial music—have been thoroughly rinsed over the last few years.
To his credit, he skillfully deploys them here. Sweat Sweat Sweat is pervaded by the garbled, chunky sound quality that's more or less Not Not Fun's trademark, at least on their more electronic releases. As a result, it isn't difficult to hear shades of other acts from the label. For example, the looping, uncannily familiar vocal and washing machine churn of "Mess Around" resembles something by LA Vampires, especially in collaboration with Matrix Metals or Ital. It's less an exception than the overall rule, though. Until its final two tracks, Sweat Sweat Sweat stays locked in oozing, molten slowness; it's a series of party jams pitched way down, their synths filtered-down and bleeding together and punctuated by unintelligible vocoder. Although they're similarly murky, "Way of Life" and "Show Is Over" take LX Sweat's sound in different directions, the former a dimly euphoric pseudo-anthem, the latter a dusted and reflective epilogue that recalls Strata-East.
On the whole, Sweat Sweat Sweat embodies the hypnagogic tropes it mines. It isn't transformative, nor is it nearly as sultry as its marketing campaign would have you believe. For how salient the sleazy packaging is, it seems to have been mostly cultivated to give the tracks some meaning. Apart from the thin, cascading funk synth on "Touch Your Body", which sounds lifted from an adult chatline commercial, there simply isn't much of this vibe to grasp onto. This is why it's successfully hypnagogic, though—its faded, atmospheric jumble only makes sense when you're not giving it your full attention.
Tracklist A1 Touch Your Body
A2 Mess Around
A3 I Know You Want It
A4 How I Feel (Jack Your Body)
B1 Doom Funk
B2 Tread You Right
B3 Way Of Life
B4 Show Is Over