There's nothing wrong with affirmation, but NONONO doesn't sound like a project that knows exactly what it's affirming. A new collaboration between production duo Astma & Rocwell and singer Stina Wäppling, the Swedish trio gestures toward the otherworldly moodiness of more adventurous electronic artists from their corner of the world. The group's debut We Are Only What We Feel is full of the kind of itchy beatwork that populated MØ's No Mythologies to Follow earlier this year, but falls even further from the Scandinavian equilibrium of terror and pleasure best embodied in the Knife's early work.
NONONO hold onto a distinctly West Coast optimism on their first LP, cutting a closer kinship to their future tourmates Foster the People or even the Dandy Warhols than any of the iconic electro-pop artists whose trappings they channel. Slick and shallow, the production on tracks like "Jungle" pairs a software-preset's take on "tribal" drums with guitar strokes so tight it's impossible to tell if they ever shook out of a real instrument. Advance single "Pumpin Blood" moves from a two-note intro borrowed from Snow Patrol into a chorus that wants so badly to be joyful, but leans entirely on the whistlecore that unraveled when Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros' "Home" got its two-thousandth play on Clear Channel.
The songs here wear happy on their skin, but start to take on the quality of a smile held too long to be natural. Wäppling sings "Pumpin Blood" like it's more of an earworm than it is, enunciating lyrics that don't do much besides reiterate anatomical fact: "It's your heart/ It's alive/ It's pumping blood." In a Knife song, the words might come through almost as a threat, rife with irony. Pasted onto this song's bare, obvious melody, they feel forgettably thin.
Though We Are Only What We Feel plods through similar tempos and uniform textures, Wäppling sings with enough character to keep the record from fading into the background. On "Like The Wind", she counters clumsy percussion with an unsettling squawk that does more to divide time than the beat. Against a staid piano arpeggio and bizarrely mismatched fuzz bass, her head voice strains with longing through the chorus of "Echo". At times, it feels like Wäppling is even fighting against her collaborators; "Down Under" punctuates her lines with a cheap sci-fi arpeggio, like Astma & Rocwell wanted to insist upon their presence as real producers of real electronic music.
Maybe there's an idiomatic rift at play here—it could be that Swedish is a language less inundated with poetry about the heart and its zest for life—but it seems more likely than NONONO started to feel comfortable before they felt confident. Very little in the album speaks to risk or discovery. The patches are the same ones that scatter throughout Soundcloud under the hands of kids trying Ableton for the first time, while the lyrics don't strive for much beyond #poetry. More than complacency, I hear a gridlock. Wäppling and her producers seem to be staring at each other from across an unproductive vacancy, not generating new ideas from their discrepancies, but playing in their own worlds, barely communicating.
