Eight years ago, Pulseprogramming's mind was on the future. On their 2003 full-length, Tulsa For One Second, the Chicago-based group-- which bills itself as a multimedia arts-collective, instead of a rock band-- made glitch-pop. They used laptop computers to marry somber melodies to knock-and-bump rhythms wrought from abstract electronic noise.
Nowadays, they're a little more interested in the past. On Charade Is Gold, Pulseprogramming-- now staffed by singer/composer Marc Hellner and vocalist Chanel Pease-- have swapped software for hardware, ditching their laptops for old-school drum machines and MIDI cables. Nearly a decade down the road from their last release, the band has chosen to head backwards in time, delivering a record heavily informed by the electronic music of the 1980s.
With its rattling lo-bit snares and lush synth-strings, album opener "Perfect Problematic" sounds like it leapt straight out of the decade of Swatch watches and sweatbands, even if the lyrics are a tad dour. "It's easier to fall apart than to heal/ To suffer the ache of age with nothing left to feel," sings Hellner. It sounds like OMD jamming with Ian Curtis after a week of overcast days. Ultimately, it's the sounds of synth-pop Pulseprogramming are interested in-- the woozy new-age chords, the twinkling analog arpeggios-- and not the genre's sunshiny sentiments. As a frontman, Hellner shies away from the soul music-informed delivery favored by his new romantic forebears. Instead he keeps his emotions pitched down and focused, for the most part, on disconnection, disappointment, and acceptance. "Even though we wait patiently, the truth is, we live with what we get," he sings on "So Right Words Strike Me", his words frozen in a snowdrift of digital strings.
Pulseprogramming's synth-pop ideal is dystopian, rather than utopian-- more Gary Numan than the Human League. Pease and Hellner use the stiff and gridded rhythms of primitive electronics to evoke the endless repetition of workaday life. For groups like Washed Out and Toro y Moi, who are also mining Reagan-era sounds, the past-- as evoked through swoony synths and Roland rhythm boxes-- is a place of bliss and innocence. On Charade Is Gold, Pulseprogramming's take is more moody. They've been around longer and, perhaps, have a clearer memory of the decade's dark side.
