Lindstrøm's second proper solo album, Six Cups of Rebel, does away with both the taut sexiness of his early work and the warm yacht breezes of Where You Go I Go Too in favor of something more bombastic but strangely cloistered. The pressure here builds and builds, but rather than taking flight, tracks like "De Javu" struggle with a misdirected explosion of percussion that flattens out into a farty bass riff smothered in layers of percussion. It's bloated, lifeless, and weighed down with its own multi-tracked mayhem, a thick, wet coat of gloss dragging propulsion down to a crawl more than anything else.
Excess is nothing new for Lindstrøm, but on Six Cups of Rebel he sounds lost. Synths layer endlessly and drums bang and clank-- this is some Emerson, Lake & Palmer shit-- but whatever power they might possess is lost as the clutter breeds a numbing sense of saturation. The breathing room that was essential to Lindstrøm's original charm, from the rattling drums of "Arp She Said" to the exhilarating fly-bys of "Where You Go I Go Too", is nowhere to be found, replaced by a suffocating blanket of midtempo muck. For an artist whose signature track's called "I Feel Space", it's disheartening to hear so little of it here.
His last album-length effort, 2010's Real Life is No Cool, a collaboratioin with singer Christabelle, showed that his luxurious disco could harbor vocals just fine (a theme that stretches all the way back to 2003's fantastic "Music in My Mind"). But here Lindstrøm's own weak, garbled vocals are caught up in the soupy current of overdubs, strangled of momentum or melodic cohesion. Even worse, on "Magik", they're pitched-down into ugly, unnatural tones, one of those "what could he have possibly been thinking" moments made only worse by the creepy backing chorus that emerges halfway through. It's cringe-inducing, another misstep for a record that's already treading unsure ground.
Rebel has a few nice moments. "Quiet Place to Live", which spends its first three minutes hobbling on an awkwardly uneven vocal hook complete with stabbing bursts of electric guitar, suddenly melts into a stunning keyboard breakdown halfway through. It's gorgeous in that silvery Lindstrøm way but completely aimless, drenching the track in generic prettiness that wears after a few bars: The vocals continue to clash and everything sounds strangely out of tune, as if he just dropped the organ carelessly on top of an entirely finished track. That brief glimmer of hope dissolves, defining the rest of the album as distinctly unmemorable, little drum fills and other pertinent details like specks of glitter on a gaudy neon canvas only adding to the fatigue. "Call Me Anytime" takes up a whole nine minutes, and I'll be damned if any of it's going to stick with me, as it cycles restlessly through a number of phases like it's desperately searching for some kind of magic glue to hold it all together.
The album finally picks up with 10-minute closer "Hina", an elongated horizon of shimmering keyboards and vocoders, anxiously pumping prog rock like the breakdown of Pink Floyd's "Dogs" sculpted and smoothed-over into a disco edit. Shrouded in filters, Lindstrøm's vocals fit better here, and the track's relative tastefulness ends the album on a strange but refreshing note of restraint. Complacency is to be avoided, but the kind of step forward Lindstrøm tries here is a drunken, misguided one. The noxious muck on evidence here obscures most of what made his past music so singular.
