The UK duo Prinzhorn Dance School have spent years refining a sound that was almost entirely free of excess and impurity to begin with. Their self-titled 2007 debut was an austere ikebana arrangement of bass, drums, vocals, and guitar that felt like an exercise in making a post-punk record out of the fewest number of notes possible. On their next album, 2011’s Clay Class, Tobin Prinz and Suzi Horn streamlined even more by removing some of the rhythmic flourishes. Coming into their third LP it seemed like there wasn’t a superfluous gesture left for the pair to remove from their sound, but they’ve managed to find some anyhow. Home Economics is in some ways an even more spartan album than its predecessors, and on other levels it’s a far richer listen.
There isn’t a note on Home Economics that doesn’t feel like it had to make it through several rounds of cuts to secure a spot on the record. In the album’s 20 or so minutes—Horn and Prinz have reached the point where six songs qualifies as an album—there’s not a superfluous millisecond. It’s a minor monument to obsessive compulsive behavior and brutal efficiency.
The funny thing is that while the pair have been surgically removing elements, a very human kind of warmth has crept in. While Prinzhorn Dance School and Clay Class felt like a tightly edited version of Gang of Four, the band’s latest feels like a Zen-garden New Order. Prinz and Horn have not only adopted an expanded worldview that allows room for considering interpersonal relationships outside the context of the capitalist-imperialist system, they’ve also started to show an unexpected gift for creating pop hooks. The aggressive edge from their earlier work hasn’t gone away completely, and you can still feel it lurking just below the surface, which gives songs like the immensely catchy opening track "Reign" or the sweetly tender "Clean" the same sense of tentativeness—an almost tangible feeling of someone hesitantly letting down their guard in hopes of connecting with someone else—that give "Temptation" and "Bizarre Love Triangle" their emotional wallop.
Without this newfound softness, Home Economics would have been much harder to connect with. The pair play negative space like an instrument; at several points on the record, an instrument will appear to be building up to a flourish before dropping out completely—silence as solo. But rather than feeling stark and severe, there’s an elegant grace in the simplicity. It makes a listener lean in to find an unexpectedly warm embrace.
