Morgan Geist and Kelley Polar (aka Mike Kelley) have been flouting dancefloor orthodoxy for more than two decades. Around the turn of the millennium, as producers on both sides of the Atlantic were stripping house and techno down to their essence, Geist and Darshan Jesrani’s duo Metro Area went the other direction, reviving the buoyant hallmarks of early-’80s disco and boogie—airy flute solos, pew-pew raygun drums, and sashaying Rhodes keys, topped with a splash of Kelley’s insouciant strings. Kelley, a viola prodigy and Juilliard graduate, went even further with his two albums that have inspired feverish devotion, while Metro Area helped lay the groundwork for Lindstrøm, Hercules & Love Affair, and the slowly building disco revival that would bring us, a decade later, to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. Who knew that a viola and some laser zaps were so revolutionary?
Aside from a fluke UK No. 1 in 2013, Geist has never matched the heights of Metro Area, though he’s remained active with short-lived affairs like the electro-funk side project Baby Oliver and the Jessy Lanza collaboration the Galleria, a freestyle-fueled ode to New Jersey’s shopping malls. Those records were charming if slightly hermetic—loving pastiches of outmoded sounds aimed primarily at fellow dance-music history buffs. But Au Suisse, Geist and Kelley’s first duo outing together after 30-odd years of friendship, feels like a major step: a cohesive and original musical statement that builds on their prior work while breaking new ground for both of them.
Behind the album’s aura of glowing tubes and brushed stainless steel is a carefully assembled tool kit of vintage synth patches, punchy electronic drums, and flickering funk guitar. Many sounds—the gaseous vox pads and trim hi-hat groove of “Thing,” the chugging arpeggios and white-noise snares of “GC”—could have come straight from a Metro Area session. But Au Suisse benefits from two extra decades of engineering know-how; Geist’s music has never sounded more sumptuous than it does here.
More importantly, widening their gaze beyond the dancefloor has allowed Geist and Kelley to expand their stylistic range, taking in a broad sweep of early-’80s reference points—disco, new romantic, sophistipop—that come together in an opalescent swirl. Like the best backward-looking art, their synth-pop amalgam is charged with an air of déjà vu: Here’s a bit of Pet Shop Boys, here’s some early Talk Talk, here’s a wisp of Scritti Politti. (One of the album’s best songs, the ethereal “Vesna,” brings to mind Tones on Tail’s 1984 single “Lions,” an ambient-pop masterpiece that far more artists ought to take cues from.) But thanks in large part to Kelley’s distinctive singing style, they sound, more than anything, like Au Suisse—no mean feat for a group so steeped in tradition.
Kelley’s unaccompanied voice is the first thing we hear, and he remains the album’s guiding force throughout. Often singing in falsetto, his tone is soft and supple, by turns swooning and arch; like the singers he emulates, he’s not afraid of affectation, even indulging in the occasional trace of a British accent. Yet his voice can be surprisingly sturdy when he wants it to be, and even at his most gossamer, he makes bold melodic choices. One of the album’s chief pleasures is the disorienting chord progressions that tilt songs on their axes without warning, and Kelley’s cool, centering presence offers a steadying hand through these moments of giddy upheaval.
He sings, mostly, about lost love, a topic that feels perfectly suited to the duo’s melancholy mien. Some lyrics consist of little more than stock phrases strung together—“All’s fair in love and war/So I ain’t gonna give up,” goes the chorus of the closing “AG,” a contemplative tone poem set to tick-tocking hi-hats—but the meaning of the words matters less than the way the phonemes perfume the air. The least successful songs, like the lilting “Eely,” are those where the synths, chord changes, and vocal tone fail to spark something greater than the sum of their parts. But occasionally, Kelley manages some striking lyrical turns.
In “Thing,” the closest thing here to a dancefloor hit, he distills a story of unrequited love down to a vivid image: “When she came to me I thought I knew enough to hold her/And she gave me pennies, just the little stuff/Not worth the time to add it up.” The opening “Control,” one of the album’s best songs, takes the torch from Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore, spinning power, religion, and sensuality into cryptic verses that are all the more seductive for their ambiguity. And “Vesna” sketches the story of a Serbian flight attendant who, half a century ago, fell to earth from an exploded airplane, the lone survivor of what was either a terrorist bombing or a military attack gone wrong: “Were her eyes closed or open? Clouds rushing past/Did she wonder how far? Did she wonder how fast?” sings Kelley, his voice as soft as cumulus formations, before the song’s meditation on fate takes a movingly empathetic turn: “And I wish I could ask her/Fading into the blue/Did you always know deep down, deep down/That it would have to be you?”
As striking as the lyrics of “Vesna” are, the real pleasure is in the way that Kelley’s hushed, reverberant harmonies gel with Geist’s pneumatic keys. The same goes for “Control,” where synths and voice dance in a graceful pas de deux. Despite the frequent harmonic maximalism, the album’s production is marked by a gratifying sense of restraint. There’s a beautiful moment around the three-minute mark where the music shrinks down to make room for Kelley’s voice; half a minute later, as Kelley sings his final “Hallelujah,” the song builds to a climax that’s unexpectedly reserved given the heart-in-mouth buildup. Even at their most emphatic, Au Suisse’s songs don’t so much explode as unfurl—gracefully, regally, like pennants announcing the anointed heirs to a long tradition of lush, emotive synth-pop: a little dandyish, at times even a little absurd, but still dazzling in their silken finery.
