With each passing summer, Studio’s lone studio album, West Coast, becomes more of a Dark Tower, an unobtainable beacon forever on the horizon, seemingly never to be reached or returned to. When the Swedish dance duo released that sprawling double album in the summer of 2007, it capped six years’ worth of singles and brought them a great deal of buzz and remix work. Dan Lissvik and Rasmus Hägg were suddenly cast to the front of Scandinavia’s nü-disco and/or nü-Balearic revival, easily lumped in with the likes of Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas, Todd Terje, the Tough Alliance, Air France, and more. It’s a landmark album in which previously demarcated indie rock and left-field dance culture hooked up, the darker and stranger kin of LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver from that same year. But after 2008’s Yearbook 2 culled their remix work for the likes of Shout Out Louds and Kylie Minogue, Hägg and Lissvik split.
Nine years on, West Coast still casts a shadow over Lissvik’s body of work as a solo artist, an expectation that Lissvik himself has nurtured. Even on his 2014 album with his project Atelje, he titled the lead track “Ode to Studio,” though its three minutes wouldn’t quite scratch that itch. At times, Lissvik’s old band seems like that old relationship that haunts him still, replaying those old fights in his head and reminiscing even as he moves on with his life.
Midnight is the result of Lissvik squeezing in recording time amidst the demands of being a new father, when the wee hours were the only time he could get to himself. He even names the eight tracks after each letter in the word. The first third is playful if not quite memorable: “M” utilizes the kind of lounge lilt that Terje dusted off on It’s Album Time, with a zippy organ line and Henry Mancini-like doot-doot-doots for good measure. But despite such lark, there’s a curlicue of guitar that pings like a steel drum and, as the perky bass falls away, a more melancholic plucked bass echoes underneath. “D” also looks back, the keys pneumatic like Gershon Kingsley’s early Moog classic “Popcorn,” while the sleek backdrop brings to mind “Blue Monday.”
But as “N” swoops down, with its slow, throbbing bassline, primitive drum machine pattern, echoing chimes, and flecks of flamenco guitar, you wonder if Lissvik might have pulled a fast one and gone back into an old hard drive to plunder some old Studio session, so dead-on is the sound. It’s one thing for Lissvik to mimic the sound palette of his old band, but what makes “N” stick is that it also conjures Studio’s telltale vibe, which was never so much ‘beach sunset’ as it was ‘darkness at noon.’ The tropes of Balearic–nylon string guitar, dub bass, analog synth, slow groove–give a more foreboding edge, a sunny shore occluded by storm clouds.
It carries on to the second “I,” which even more closely resembles a lost track from West Coast, winding like an island road at night. It carries over to “G,” the album track with the toughest nü-disco beat. Lissvik expertly brings in filigrees of hand percussion, stings of wah-wah guitar and those infinitely echoing wordless exhalations that haunted West Coast tracks like “Origin” and “West Side.” About the only thing they are missing is Lissvik’s insouciant, Robert Smith-like vocals. But then, just like that, Midnight returns to intriguing-but-not-vital terrain with “H,” a brief future-bass type of doodle, and “T,” another breezy nü-disco instrumental. The effect is such that it makes those three middle tracks seem like an aural mirage, West Coast still totemic and distant on the horizon after all this time.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed Studio vocals to Hagg, rather than Lissvik.
