You'd be forgiven for thinking Planet Mu is all about twitchy, high-tempo music these days, given prominent albums from Machinedrum and Kuedo, not to mention their ongoing documentation of the Chicago footwork sound that influences those artists. But over the past two years, the English label has placed just as much stock into warmed-over and vaguely nostalgic sounds, riffing off of chillwave and hypnagogic pop but dressing it all up in beat-oriented structures compatible with the UK bass dialogue that Planet Mu otherwise engages with. Artists like Boxcutter, Solar Bears, Oriol, Tropics, and even FaltyDL have all swum down this lukewarm stream of lazy watercolor, and the label ends one of its best years ever with its first release by Greek duo Keep Shelly in Athens.
Making their first appearance on Mu with a remix of fellow dream-popper Tropics, the lead track off of their first solo EP is also a remix. If this move seems a little disingenuous at first-- is their own material just not up to snuff?-- it's easy to understand why once you actually play the thing. Solar Bears' original "Cub" was one of their album's more wandering pieces, three minutes of spidery guitar and mellotron, vaguely medieval in its execution. But in Keep Shelly in Athens' hands, it's an achingly poignant quiet-stormer. Unravelling and pitch-bending that guitar riff to queasy extremes, the duo pushes a staggered beat underneath it, along with its usual assortment of wafting vocal samples. Once the drop hits, it pushes forward with a surprising momentum: Spiraling down a vortex of intense color, "Cub" is a misty rush of twinkling synths and adult-contemporary vocals molded into wordless but heart-tugging shapes.
It's a hell of an introduction, and it sets up the band for high expectations on their original material. They deliver as well as anyone could expect such a young band to: "The Chains" throws a foundation of rolling basslines and taut percussive loops underneath frontwoman Sarah P's soft vocals, and suddenly bursts into a clangorous, banging echo chamber where drums ominously beat in a pseudo-dubstep pattern. It's a tantalizing 20 seconds that never gets less startling or less powerful, and the duo throws those lurching beats all over "Struggle With Yourself", where Sarah P's vocals merge with the humid and cloudy backdrop, and the drums glitch, catch, and screech rudely underneath. The surprisingly nasty underbelly keeps the otherwise lightweight songs from floating away completely, and offers a tangible undercurrent separating them from a legion of anodyne dream-pop acts all singing the same pleasantly slurred tune.
The EP's only uncertain moment comes with its title track, which pairs an awfully saccharine piano motif over erratically sliced percussion, a tension between the beautiful and the berserk that recalls Kuedo's majestic Severant only without the careful balance of melodrama and grit. But even here, vocals gently ride the beat with a supple propulsion that, just like on their remix of "Cub", proves addictive and persuasive without predictability. They're still dealing with the unassembled spare parts of what sounds like could be a tight, confident outfit, but the configurations they try on here are promising and at the least intriguing. They might not have answered the question of what exactly separates them from the bleary-eyed masses, but considering the caliber of the artists they're now mingling with on Planet Mu, the possibility for nurturing artistic growth seems high. One's thing for sure: They do one hell of a remix.
