A.R. Kane - 69

Like a nemesis of Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, A.R. Kane's 69 gives to witness a dark and twisted twin of the vanishing point Mark Hollis offered indie pop at the very end of the 1980's: an early example of a new post-rock sound that would fully bloom on Slint's Tweeze or in the desolate British music of Hood, Movietone and Crescent.

Few records sits so perfectly on the border between two decades (in that case, the brash and glistening 1980's of Thatcher's Great Britain and the fuzzy and slightly doomed guitar-driven 1990's) than Alex Ayuli and Rudi Tambala's debut LP, a disturbingly off-centered and hard to pin-down album of mutating post-punk that embraces the sludge revolution before it actually happened. Alex Ayuli famously claimed responsability for coining the the term “dreampop” to describe their music, but if A.R. Kane's music is dream pop, then it’s a very dark, feverish kind of dream they're having: sometimes recalling the eerie kind of doom jazz playing in Lynch's worlds ("the Madonna is With Child"), 69 is an ethereal answer to the machine-heavy industrial nightmare of Suicide ("Sullivan"), offering an overall sonic radicalness that has more to do with Psychic TV than the light and bittersweet sound of Sarah Records. At times heavily psychedelic ("Spermwhale Trip Over", "The Sun Falls Into the Sea"), 69 is undoubtedly made of the same fabric dreams are made of, drowning pop songs under a a tidal wave of reverb and delay effects, and thus unobscuring whole new fringes of pop music for the decade to come. (VG+/VG+)