New Tunes - Van She and The Field

The music collection has swelled by a whopping two discs. Here are the initial impressions...

The Field - From Here We Go Sublime
The proverbial punching bag of the electronic music scene is trance. Produce music that vaguely approximates a drone set to a steady yet subterranean beat and it is likely to attract heaping mounds of derision from the loftier and more cultured minds of the house and breaks set. And in most cases it's well deserved. There's a lot of shit out there and there's a lot of shit trance out there. Rightly stated, The Field is undeserving of being saddled with the trance albatross. Skirting close to the minimalist school of bleep, The Field—apparently a one man act from Sweden—deliberately toys with repetition, paving an aural pathway that seems to promise a lively journey towards a clearly defined location, only to loop back on itself a few metres from where it all started. It's mildly infuriating but oddly enough it works. A week or two into the purchase it's found its way into regular rotation.

Van She - Van She
What are we to make of the eighties? At the time they seemed like an improvement over the cultural missteps of the seventies, but now that we're a generation clear of the era, the status of the decade is looking kind of shaky. The cinema was kind of naff, the clothes actually got worse, but at least we got The Smiths. So why is everyone trying their gosh-darned hardest to evoke the crappest parts of the ten years that gave us Bros., Milli Vanilli and Martika? Van She, in their defence, seem to be taking the piss—sort of. On one hand they're winking at the audience while they belt out a few thinly veiled retreads of early Depeche Mode, but on the other hand their blatant channelling of old synthesiser sounds from 1982 hints at a belief that they're transcending something more than musical; to them it's an ironic fashion statement. Played within the framework of kitsch, Van She get away with it, but they're seriously deluded if their high school variety of irony is anything more than a flash in the pan. But I'm listening to it right now and it ain't half bad.