When you think of a diva, probably the last person that comes to mind is Erlend Øye. In terms of physical dimensions, the featherweight, Poindexter-glasses Øye looks more like a guy that would help you out with your calculus than the kind of person who would get people on the floor. Work experience? Øye made his name with the Norwegian duo Kings of Convenience, an outfit bookish enough to title an album Quiet Is the New Loud without gagging over their own preciousness. They're not exactly Fischerspooner where image is concerned.
And yet, the Kings have already tipped their hand about their secret predilection for the electronic world, having released the remix album Vs. last year with work from the likes of Rökysopp and Four Tet. Now, Øye's decided to take the complete binary plunge-- he'll Garfunkel no more! Collaborating with a slew of laptop jockeys from around the world on each artist's home turf, Øye's strung together an LP that's all about the disco.
For an album where each track is under new management from the one before it, Unrest remains remarkably consistent in tone and quality. It helps that all of Øye's collaborators, no matter the pedigree, leave the avant-garde leanings at home for fairly straightforward electro-pop atmospheres wrapped rather conventionally around what I assume were pre-prepared verse/chorus/verse Øye originals. Here, frontiersmen like Prefuse 73 and Schneider TM prove themselves equally capable of applying their arsenal to a more direct sound (Schneider TM, in particular, have some previous experience from their 2002 album Zoomer) as they are to working in abstract territories.
However, the more immediately appealing songs are by artists already hip-deep in Italo-disco or house. Morgan Geist kicks off the proceedings with an understated, moody synth bonanza on "Ghost Trains," then is narrowly outdone by the livelier hydraulic-hiss percussion and swoop-strings of his fellow Americans in electro band Soviet, who are not afraid to make "Sheltered Life" bounce beneath Øye's croon. But like most things these days, Sweden takes the opening trio of tunes, representative Kompis shellacking "Sudden Rush" with a subtle lite-rock sheen and a perfect head-bob bassline.
Compared to these easy-swallow tablets, the more heady work of the marquee acts take a bit more time to sink in. Prefuse 73's "Every Party" throws Øye onto a set of Scott Herren's trademark Nordictrack-glide beats to make the song stand out from the tighter house beats of its neighbors, but also never reaches the peaks of the more trad-club jams. Schneider TM, on the other hand, brings the affair to a new level without sacrificing the song format, irregular drums and sudden clumps of notes still coming together to appropriately swoon under the "my baby" romantic choruses of "Like Gold".
But let's not commit the sin of forgetting young Mr. Øye just because it's annoying to keep inserting that "Ø" symbol-- he's playing conductor through all this jazz, and he does it skillfully. Whereas his decidedly non-dramatic voice might sound like a limitation in this kind of setting on paper, his cool delivery is run through with just enough melody to be more hummable (see: "The Talk") than the ironic detachment that sometimes brings down this genre. Quietly assured, he recalls no one so much as the Notwist's Markus Acher, another fish-out-of-water finding a new home amongst the whirring machines.
Thus, despite sagging a bit in the middle, Unrest skillfully skirts the myriad ways this kind of variety project could go wrong. The main failing I'd peg is a disappointing tendency to be overly retro-based, all too focused on Stevie Wonder keyboards and the days of asymmetric hair. With indie rock and dance music showing indications that they might be merging onto the same highway somewhere in the near future, it's time to tone down the recycling and start applying the innovations of IDM to this ungodly, and possibly thrilling, hybrid. While only Schneider TM seems fully up to that promise on Unrest, it still stands by Enon and The Postal Service as another important signpost on the way to new pixilated horizons. Forward things push let's!
