If you relocated Stereolab from a retro-futurist bachelor's pad to an indie rocker's Williamsburg walkup, you might get something like Au Revoir Simone, a trio who play old keyboards and sing simple harmonies over rickety drum machines. Their patterned musical figures and calmly rendered vocal lines create a sense of pleasant remove from their subject matter, which is usually devotion. Smoothing down charged emotions with something between plucky self-control and spooky disassociation, Erika Forster, Annie Hart, and Heather D'Angelo can seem all the more ghostly for how they blend together on record, which gives their most private and personal sentiments an airy, collective tinge of the afterlife. But while staying that course for the last decade, the trio has cautiously let more irregularity and individuality creep into their electronic dream pop. The process of letting go accelerates on their most raucous album to date, Move in Spectrums, their first since drifting apart after 2009's Still Night, Still Light.
The title of Au Revoir Simone's debut, Verses of Comfort, Assurance & Salvation, summed up the candidly inspirational milieu of their first two records and, to a lesser extent, their pivotal third one. Verses and The Bird of Music set sentimental homilies against toy-like sounds, striking a balance between innocent sweetness and unnerving detachment that caught the ear of someone who perfected the blend, David Lynch. But with Still Night, Still Light, a change took hold. The band grew a dance music spine, the drum machines pounding as often as spritzing, and their lyrical themes grew more downcast and mature, if still couched in consoling tones. Their music had always felt like a nocturnal illumination, but now it evoked neon flashes on dark city streets more than a nightlight, with the worldliness of electro-pop displacing the formative influences of the baby's mobile, the lullaby, the music box.
After spending several years working on other projects and regrouping, Au Revoir Simone pick up that leveler gaze where it left off on Move in Spectrums. Even fans of Still Night might be surprised by the hefty black synthesizer that opens the record, a far cry from the group’s origins in sparkling lightness. Throughout, their drum machine programming, which used to tend toward a compact fizz, is spacious and storm-lashed, roiling with grayscale tones. The music strays into some thin atmosphere during the home stretch, but before that it feels stronger and more driven than ever before. The record is frontloaded with its best pop looks: "More Than" demonstrates a new vocal mobility and freedom, oscillating powerfully between a bare Georgia Hubley-like murmur and a scrambling unison chorus; "The Lead is Galloping" has the commanding icy patina of Broadcast; and album highlight "Crazy" bolts along on a stuttering electric note with a bouncy vocal delivery worthy of Tracyanne Campbell.
The synth that simulates a guitar is most prominent, in delayed glassy shards, on the down-tempo "We Both Know", which represents the best of the album's more pensive side. The sluggish attack and slow tom rolls of "Boiling Point" begin a gentle unraveling of the music's seams. "Love You Don’t Know Me" cycles one lyric over little more than naturalistic piano tones and a loose snare, and feels more like running out of ideas than profound understatement. More engagingly, "Hand Over Hand" runs a notched synth note through rough silk chords, though the drums from earlier in the record are missed. But this low-impact stretch perks up with the svelte dance-pop of "Just Like a Tree", the soulful and joyous "Somebody Who", and especially "Gravitron", which feels like M83 personalized for Au Revoir Simone's more intimate world. Dramatic and driving, it never quite escapes the upper atmosphere, though thick loopy synth shapes provide an ample climax, showing how this band can go bigger without forsaking its cloistered center.
