All pop music is love and theft, and Soft Metals are particularly upfront about both. The arty Portland electronic duo formed in early 2009, with singer Patricia Hall and keyboardist/programmer Ian Hicks becoming a romantic couple not much later. The two recently did a mean cover of Throbbing Gristle's 1979 "Hot on the Heels of Love", a techno-predicting cult classic that mixes robotic arpeggios and steamy vocals (recalling Donna Summer's rapturous "I Feel Love" from a couple of years earlier) with the industrial pioneers' own creepy foreboding.
Soft Metals' self-titled album extends that combination of lovers' intimacy and retro-futuristic ominousness, which Hall and Hicks previously introduced on the 2010 EP The Cold World Melts. With Hall's detached, often-indecipherable vocals over Hicks' pulsating configurations of vintage synthesizers and drum machines, Soft Metals bears traces of virtually every bleakly gliding descendant of Kraftwerk's O.G. synth-pop grooves, from gothic early-1980s new wave to house, techno, and electroclash. But it's somewhat telling that this blurrily beguiling debut-- which reprises two tracks from the EP, plus eight new ones-- arrives on Brooklyn-based Captured Tracks, a label better known for the lo-fi noise-pop of Blank Dogs, Beach Fossils, or Wild Nothing.
As with their labelmates, Soft Metals' aesthetic is born not of lavish studios but in the bedroom. The songs on Soft Metals have a foggy, surrealistic shimmer rather than the clear-cut precision of many of their electronic forebears. Where Ariel Pink cohort John Maus uses like-mindedly retro trappings as a jumping-off point for experiments with ideas about art and artifice, Soft Metals concentrate instead on the type of subtly evolving textures you might be more inclined to play when you're drifting off to sleep than when you're throwing a dance party. Even the most lucid songs here, whether echo-besotted EP cut "Voices" or swelling first-meeting reminiscence "Do You Remember", stake their appeal on their glistening, ever-changing surfaces, not traditional songcraft.
Still, just because your brand of old-school electronics has more in common with mood-oriented Italians Do It Better producer Johnny Jewel (Glass Candy, Chromatics) than with song-driven nu-disco princess Sally Shapiro ("I'll Be By Your Side") doesn't mean the wordless repetitions of "Celestial Call" or "Hold My Breath" fully reward our attention. Then again... Soft Metals might wince at this comparison, but it's not such a leap from their album's prelude-to-a-kiss cover art to the Cosmo-copped sex scene (speaking of love and theft!) that adorns Washed Out's latest. Soft Metals' "Eyes Closed" may have a faster tempo, a more dangerous charge, and one fewer title syllable than languid Within and Without opener "Eyes Be Closed", but they're both headed toward a similarly sensual place.
If Soft Metals are nostalgic, however, it's less for lost innocence than for a lost idea of the future. Where are the flying cars? The album's use of analogue synths isn't a regression, but an attempt to find a new way forward. On instrumental finale "In Throes", they finally do, as eerie buzzes and disjointed rhythms chart a course somewhere near the Knife's still-unmatched 2006 dark-electronic landmark Silent Shout. In the end, the more important love on Soft Metals isn't necessarily between Hall and Hicks; it's between them and three-plus decades of synthesizer music. And wherever that leads next.
