Düsseldorf may be a cold place — according to the lyrics of a song for which I can’t help hoping White Car are named — but if, with David Bowie, we consider that we have there the “soundtrack of the 80s,” we’re on our way in the eponymous automobile. Unlike other modern subscribers to the doctrine of eternal return, however, White Car bring something new to the mix, in the form of beautifully clean production values, oomphy beats, and a tinge of more recent electronic dance sounds — particularly, whiffs of trance. And in contrast to many of their better-known compatriots, White Car are interested less in the melancholy possibilities of 80s synth wave and more in crunchy, dissonant exploration. Towards the album’s close, we even get hints of an unrealized evolution into the kind of elongated, electronic funk-punk discordance characteristic of Grace Jones or Gary Numan.
At times, the extension of pieces away from the classic three-minute minimal wave trope builds up a dubby or motorik logic of repetition — trancey in an Other sense — which reveals the direction that a contemporary, combinatory sensibility might give to that basic palette. But main man Elon Katz’s paranoid wail is the vehicle (pun intended) for lyrical themes that (where decipherable over their distortion) remain familiar from White Car’s influences: alienation and the abject body, the technological society, and the logic of production/consumption.
On that last note, there’s a great deal of potential capital here (if I may turn to the deep-structuring discourse of neoliberal society), but it often remains unexploited. Addictive beats are thrown away on go-nowhere interludes, but the real spanner in the works is the sheer lack of earworms. In terms of instrumentation, for example, “The Factor” sounds like the lovechild of “People Are People” and Front 242’s seminal “Headhunter” — but classic tunes like these, or other obvious points of reference (say, Fad Gadget’s “Collapsing New People” or Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant”) traded precisely on the contrast between their harsh sonic substance and their irresistible hookiness. White Car are all revved up to drive circuits of meathooks and tender hooks, metal and flesh, pleasure and pain, but as things stand (inasmuch as they don’t move), instead of being behind the wheel, we (as) spectators find ourselves in the stalls, stalled.
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