- Look past The Cube and the capes and there’s still music at the heart of the Minus juggernaut. All that conceptual twaddle, however, can threaten to overshadow such straightforward releases as this. ‘Signs’ is the first single from Heartthrob’s forthcoming debut LP, and first Minus release post-Cube, and while there’s a welcome degree of noise and girth here, the tidy arrangement makes it plainly Minus.
On the title track the bass and drums hit fast (five to the bar) and hard, setting up a regimented structure upon which Jesse Siminski does what he does best: tweaking a catchy melody into all manner of timbres, a la ‘Baby Kate‘. This flits between wooden marimba textures and clunky dulcimer pings before growing bolder, splitting into reverberant 808 chasms and piercing metallic tones. It’s satisfying stuff, the bass a gorging beast, shards of distortion erupting from well-placed intervals, but while ‘Signs’ piles on the bigroom tricks like Audion, it lacks that producer’s shameless abandon.
B-side ‘Apprentice’ is similarly well-hung, with a bassline of dubstep proportions, but here it squirms like a viper, or rather a python. A clipped melody jerks and stutters, shifting wildly in pitch and tone, but again this is too closely controlled. I’d like these to fly off the scale like Minilogue’s spastic improvisations.
The digital release includes 'Valentine', a beatless, rhythmic exercise in digitised Morton Subotnik drips, hardly essential but a pleasant four minutes. Minus devotees will likely lap this up but, to use their own language, there’s nothing much here beyond formulaic minimal.
TracklistA Signs
B Apprentice
(digital only) Valentine