Komëit - Komëit

Lok Musik - LP

Electronic / Indie / 2000's dream pop

I have a very special fondness for early 2000's weightless indie electro pop - probably one of the least respected genres by the community of records buyers these days, if I trust Discogs stats (bad have/want ratios, low grades and even lower prices). All the better; it's a territory lying in the shadow of Lali Puna that I can explore freely - without fearing any kind of interferences, no hype, no peer-pressure - with only one criteria: either I like the music or I don't. My own private Idaho.

I understand why people have been instinctively dismissing the music of German duo Komeït for the past 20 years: it's uncomplicated, sugar-coated and polished. Their debut album simply consists of dreamy ritournelles and post-Durutti Column jams of easy guitar chords and simple machinedrum patterns (two things I tend to fall for easily): music with a long history of facing disdainful remarks from journalists and music nerds (the same applied to Sarah Records and a lot of now celebrated dream pop imprints and acts from the early 1990's). But it always seemed that none of these dream pop people ever cared. They knew they weren't 1990's Zappas, and certainly didn't pretend they were, anyway. And precisely because of that, their music often reached degrees of spontaneity rarely reached by more self-conscious musicians, whether because they were addressing bigger/ more mainstream audiences or because they were coming from more artsy scenes. 

Komeït's tunes remind me of "Just You", that song James, Donna and Maddy sing in the second season of Twin Peaks (Komeït has a song called "Instead of You"): their songs seem to come from similarly wired late teenagers' brains, who grew up in Europe in the early days of Internet and 3D animation instead of a remote Washington State town during the last stage of the Cold War. It's music discreet and subtle enough for one to come back to regularly over the months and years. Music I can never really get tired of. (VG+/VG+)