We Love: We Love

We Love
We Love
Bpitch Control
2010-09-14

We Love is filled to the brim, bursting with songs that are this close. This is synthpop, as pure as synthpop gets, with all kinds of sequencer and synth noises on top of purely synthetic beats, with disaffected competition between male and female vocalists. It’s a perfect formula for an album on a label called Bpitch Control, but it rarely comes together the way it should. It’s as if, in their push for a minimalist sound, they never allow their songs to take off; a promising first 30 seconds isn’t enough to carry an entire song. “Even If”, one of the strongest tracks, starts off with a barrage of parallel fourths that evoke Gregorian Chant — a novel idea, really, for a synthpop track — but once the beat kicks in, you’ve heard everything it has to offer. Opener “Ice Lips” promises a Bjork-meets-Soft Cell sound that never quite materializes, and “Don’t Cross” suffers from banal lyrical repetition. Eight-minute closer “White March” finally sees the duo giving a song enough time to develop an interesting instrumental arc, layering a whole pile of sounds on top of a dance beat and punctuating it with some cut-up vocals, but it’s a case of “too little too late”. Most of this self-titled effort is simply too underplayed to attract any interest at all.

RATING 4 / 10