My favorite trick on the opening title track to Lindstrøm's Where You Go I Go Too was first revealed on his 2005 album with Prins Thomas: During long stretches of its near half-hour length, the arrangement does this wonderful and unsettling thing where the music simultaneously seems to expand outwards, curl in on itself, and then unexpectedly swerve off to the side. With its shimmering, strobing synthesizer melodies, dizzy layering, and measured rhythmic pulse, "Where You Go I Go Too" superficially resembles the depth of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians and the cheesy grandeur of Tangerine Dream. But, as with his recent covers of Can ("Mighty Girl") and Jon & Vangelis (last year's "Let It Happen"), its logic is all Lindstrøm: The more he embraces the work of others, the more he ends up sounding like himself.
The rest of Where You Go I Go Too transposes the ambitions of the title track into shorter settings: With its floating chords and bubbly enthusiasm, "Grand Ideas" is close to Lindstrøm's more classicist disco work and given a heightened intensity by its placement in the middle of the album, like a moment of clarity amidst the disorienting swirl. Closer "The Long Way Home" apes the title track's splendor but with a twist: The synth work of its first half is complemented by hyper-manicured guitar breaks. In its second half, the track capitulates entirely to its cornier impulses, shifting into plush and suffocatingly slow electronic disco-funk.
Stretching three tracks over 55 minutes and occasionally wandering far away from the dancefloor, Where You Go I Go Too has all the hallmarks of a masterpiece from a reclusive auteur. And while it shares its bloat, excess, and splendor with any number of cosmic disco or Balearic producers at the more decadent end of disco revivalism, it begs for a context more weighty than "disco revivalism." Paradoxically, Lindstrøm knows all the right moves to give his own brand of spacey disco an air of transcendence, but the result feels so effortless that his facsimile and the "real thing" become indistinguishable-- a fake so real it's beyond fake.
