Croatian Amor’s newest album Love Means Taking Action is the latest entry to the ever-expanding canon of albums that wrestle with the infinite nuances of love. As one of many monikers of Loke Rahbek—a key figure in the Copenhagen punk scene and co-founder of the Posh Isolation label—he explores the idea abstractly, in a fluctuating volley of electronics that communicate everything from ecstasy to despair. Under Croatian Amor, it is the closest he comes to making ambient music, removed from the retro synthpop he plays with Lust for Youth, the power electronics he creates under the LR moniker, or the various explorations of noise he makes in collaboration with Olymphia, Damien Dubrovnik, or Puce Mary. It’s a project that has always been able to balance beauty’s relationship with the ugly.
Never has this dichotomy been more present than on Love Means Taking Action, where both of these elements are amplified more than ever before. It’s perfectly displayed in the opening song “An Angel Gets His Wings Clipped” where a solitary, echoing voice sings a stark melody for a solid minute before all the electronics start swelling around it like steam cutting through earth. The give-and-take emerges, and tension begins to consume everything, setting the tone for what’s to come.
Love Means Taking Action separates itself from Croatian Amor’s previous work because of its ability to maintain an overall mood among its many smaller shifts. Older works like Genitalia Garden would constantly reset tone between tracks, choosing between a darker or lighter sound. Whereas here a song like “No Sex Club” starts so claustrophobically with single-tone electronics and cut up samples of someone panting, only to give way to bright, piano-like chords that shift the whole tenor of the song, while still keeping the original creeping sensation present in the background. These production changes point toward the greater risks Rahbek is taking here. The vocal slicing and splicing on “Like Angel” are reminiscent of Holly Herndon, and the short piano piece “Nadim Call Emergence II” would never exist on previous releases. Here they not only make sense, but give the more traditional Croatian Amor compositions (“Octopus Web,” “Any Life You Want”) more gravity.
These violent contrasts should lead to a complete lack of cohesion. And while the album creates a kind of confusion initially, if this is Rahbek’s attempt to define love, or at least to understand the interaction between other people, then of course there will be odd juxtapositions and gorgeous conflict. But Rahbek ends the album with the title track, one of his prettiest compositions to date, a cheese-filled blossom of skeletal ’80s synths that remains the album’s brightest most cohesive moment as something gorgeous takes hold of everything. It’s as though all the previous chaotic dissonance is a means to arrive, finally, at harmony.
