Blogarhythms

Okay… Fine… Summer’s here and it’s not going anywhere any time soon. I’ve come to terms with that. I still hate running errands in the sweltering heat. But I’ve come to realize that being soaked in sweat and racking up kilowatt hours running my air conditioner aren’t nearly as terrible as some of the events that have befallen me during Summers past.

Last year was probably the worst yet, so much so that it doesn’t need recounting here. But the Summer before that was pretty ridiculous too. The zenith of awfulness being a severe storm that struck late in the season and caused catastrophic damage to the aging tenement building I call home. I should have known something unexpected was gonna go down when earlier that Summer my radio-show co-host Emeyesi nearly got us slapped with a cease-and-desist order from XL Records for playing tracks from Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke’s solo release The Eraser on our radio show prior to street date.

I didn’t expect a label promo guy to get mad because we’d played one of his records any more than I expected the errant thunderstorm. After all, it’s usually the exact opposite when it comes to people in that sort of position. But it happened, and it sucked the fun and excitement out of our radio gig for a few weeks, especially since we really liked that Thom Yorke record and wanted to play it. Granted, the roof flying off my building a few weeks after that sucked even more, but you get the gist.

Conversely, I don’t think Pitch9 Recordings will be at all upset if I shed a little light on Blame the Voters, their new release from Valutan, an Indietronica duo hailing from Malmö, Sweden which bears more than a passing resemblance to Thom Yorke’s laptop-produced opus. As a matter of fact, I don’t think they’d mind at all if I told everybody reading this right now to go download it free of charge, because the label itself is giving it away as a 100% free download on their website. That being the case, Emeyesi can play it to his hearts content, while I can hope spreading good musical karma lessens the chance of any further weather-related disasters befalling me.

In addition to their affinity for Radiohead’s elf-like vocalist, group members J. Woulf and C. Manhattan seem to fancy the creakily crippled Dubstep beats of Burial, the glitchy musique concrète of Matthew Herbert and the usual suspects from the Warp Records school of IDM & the Laptop/Glitch/Indie-Electronica underground. As such, fans of The Eraser, Untrue and lesser-known Glitch-Pop artists like Milosh should find the skipping rhythms, pulsating kicks, chattering snares, anxious hi-hats, dithered noises, rumbling basslines, ghostly vocal samples, haunting digital artifacts and Me and You and Everyone We Know-reminiscent keys of “Walden,” “Bright Lights, Big City,” “Carve Your Niche,” “Make a Name As a Businessman” and “Slip Through Like a Transaction” music to their ears.

Valutan “Slip Through Like a Transaction”

Sporting lyrics concerned largely with decaying humanity living in decaying cities and participating in a decaying society, delivered passionlessly, as if by a detached observer, over a soundscape of dirty digital decay, Blame the Voters feels sort of like Boom-Bip and Gruff Rhys‘ recent Neon Neon project in reverse. In other words, it functions as a critique of the greed and decadence of the corporate culture epitomized by the Reaganomics-fueled ’80s and measures the impact those ideals continue to have on the world rather than glamorizing it.

That spirit of world-weary paranoia and overarching sense that something is very wrong and someone will have to pay for it somehow which saturates the album makes Valutan’s likeness to Thom Yorke even more striking. It also makes Blame the Voters perfect for these hot and humid Summer days where, despite even the brightness of the Sun itself — nay because of it’s effect on our atmosphere — dark clouds sometimes have a way of emerging all of a sudden to bring heaven’s wrath crashing down on us unexpectedly.

* Note: I’ve no reason to believe Valutan actually rhymes with “value-than.” Pronounce it that way at your own risk.