Thanks to Röyksopp and Kleerup, we've developed expectations over the past few years about dance-and-pop-minded producers from Scandinavia. These studio auteurs may wander between genre borders, but their penchant for listenable electro-pop offset by voices (almost exclusively female) tinged with melancholy tends to help make their albums feel like organic units rather than tossed-together jumbles. Not so with Kasper Bjørke, whose vocal-aided tracks are odd and disparate and whose instrumental cuts are even more schizophrenic.
Standing on Top of Utopia is Bjørke's second full-length release under his birth name, following 2007's equally haphazard In Gumbo, and it's full of tantalizing moments that never threaten to coalesce into something resembling a coherent whole. The album's first track, "Animals", is disconcertingly cool and minimal, nicely throbbing electro-pop that nonetheless feels out of place as an opener. "Young Again" is equally disquieting thanks to vocalist and songwriter Jacob Bellens, whose brooding, loud voice contrasts oddly with the song's romantic words (Bellens appears again on "Alcatraz", where his deep voice comes off cheesy delivering serious lyrics).
The best vocal cut by far is "Efficient Machine", which successfully blends post-punk steeliness with pure disco pleasure much in the same vein as LCD Soundsystem, complete with irresistibly slippery bass, handclaps, and cowbell. It's bookended by the album's two best instrumentals-- "Dasko Vanitas", which features muted disco guitar plucks bleeding into techno, and "Melmac", a woozy jam that touches on mutant disco. On the whole, however, Utopia has a haphazard feel-- it moves from piano-driven disco vamp "Alcatraz" to the darkly foreboding instrumental "Great Kills" to a cover of the forgotten Rolling Stones' gem, "Heaven".
Bjørke closes Utopia with a pair of tracks every bit as unexpected and awkwardly fitting as the two that began it. The glitchy "Fido & the Friendly Ghost" nods both in title and tenor to Bjørke's minimal house side guise, Kasper Bjørke & His Friendly Ghost, while the beatless, burbling "Fasano" ends things on an expectant but unresolved note. Bjørke is clearly an artist-producer who likes to put his finger in lots of different pies, and he should be commended for such restlessness and flexibility. Still, it would be nice to see him pursue some of these avenues a bit more thoroughly as opposed to cramming so many detours into one 48-minute trip.
