Ascii Disko - 'Ascii Disko' (Lado)
2/5
By: Maugan Lloyd
The 20-year nostalgia cycle means that we all officially love electro now; Duran Duran got this year's Lifetime Achievement Brit and fashionistas of both sexes are dressing like the Human League. It's no surprise that some of those who bathe in the font of rock want to get down with the kids and get all 1981 on their ass.
But it's not entirely fair to suggest that Ascii Disko is a product of jumping someone else's train. Here is more than Just Another Rocker trying to mix himself into industrial PVC trousers with a shit-load of computer equipment. And those are some uncomfortable trousers man, KMFDM Clint Boon managed it from time to time, but many have fallen bloodied and bruised at the DJ-booth. Hamburg's one-man studio, Kat D. D. Rocc, meanwhile, may have come from indie-guitar roots, but he's long since felt the magnetism of the big shiny computer equipment with a zillion wires and knobs that produce rhythmic squelching and flattened snares.
Opener 'Immer' starts with a promisingly heavy synth-funk groove aping Fisherspooner's 'Emerge'. But when the drums kick in, they're disappointingly flaccid. We want our electro to pound the body to the core rather than wimp out into sub-house territories. If it doesn't do this, the tunes have to be storming and Ascii Disko tends to fall short. If you're gonna do solely retro, then you need the killer tunes, and there's not enough invention here to salaciously grope the attention.
The exception is 'Strassen', a track that evokes the ghost of Falco, stomps hard like the man should and has an evilly parasitic hook that has spent the day crashing about in our brains and making our bodies want to do the same in a smoky, strobe-lit club.
The rest falls into the standard dance album one idea trap; the tracks start off promisingly and hammeringly enough, but after three minutes of it with no attractive changes of pace, dynamic, energy, breakdowns, or new themes, you just want the whole thing to fade to grey. A whole album of this and we're nodding off.
Clearly, in part, it amounts to a debut with promise, but - as yet - there's nothing here that's fit to lick Miss Kitten's heels.
Artists in this article: Ascii Disko
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