Sensitive clubbers of the world, unite. Thieves Like Us singer Andy Grier, an American, met keyboardist Björn Berglund and drummer Pontus Berghe, both Swedes, when they all lived in Berlin. The Tron-loving filter-house electro-poppers now call Paris home, and French label Kitsuné picked up their big single, the euphoric but also melancholic downtown-metro ride "Drugs in My Body". Debut album Play Music was variously conceived and created in Berlin, Vienna, New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, and Stockholm.
Finally getting a belated U.S. release, the disc justifies some but not all of its carbon footprint. New Order's 1984 hit "Thieves Like Us" exemplified how those UK synth-pop icons could take something "so uncool"-- like love of tech gadgetry-- and give it a certain expensively wasted glamor. "Drugs in My Body" adapts this strategy for our post-Daft Punk ears. It's hyper-urban strobe-pop, with aching vocals and a tightly coiled Durutti Column sample that could appeal not only to don't-call-it-blog-house LastNightsPartyers, but also to Factory-worshiping indie bedwetters like me. The full album should be an okay soundtrack for a hoverbus tour of some retrofuturistic metropolis, but it's somewhere just outside of track 3 when the Dramamine starts to kick in.
Play Music slows down more often than your Justice Mobile Digitalisms, and when it does it tends to lose some focus. Unfortunately, the horn-haunted nighttime cityscape of "An Easy Tonight" sounds less like the City of Lights than the City That Makes Me Kinda Sleepy; the solid but unremarkable kosmische of "Lady" needs something a little more distinctive alongside its tasteful woundedness. Most of the singing was recorded at home, which helps it sound sincere, but also helps it sound like a specific, time-fixed notion of sinceirty (won't anyone just let Ian Curtis rest in peace?). Shoulda-been instrumental "Program of the Second Part" suggests, "Sing along to Suicide."
Of course, smuggling open-hearted vocal frailness into ecstatic electronic dance-pop can still have thrilling results, as New Order showed, and the likes of the Tough Alliance continue to demonstrate. Thieves Like Us are usually best when they're giving us a spoonful of sugar to help the miserabilia go down-- feeling low at a higher tempo on "Your Heart Feels", for example, or daydreaming about David and Angela Bowie on the similarly faster-paced "Miss You". "Drugs in My Body" B-side "Fass" also does all right despite meh meta lyrics about crossing "scene lines." But the second-best thing here actually has to be finale "Sugar and Song", a sure-enough slow breakup ballad that's as depressive as so much good Spiritualized. Although Play Music drags more than I would've hoped, it's still a reasonably lustrous place to be sad now and then-- without drugs in my body, but not without "Drugs in My Body".
