For the love of Wendy Carlos and Gary Numan, what is the point of this album?! Moscow duo Dasha Utachka and Danya Mu are Love Object, yet another signing on Johnny Jewel’s tres stylish Italians Do It Better. Billed as “dark wave”, or “experimental”, or as forward-thinking dance music, etc., it’s likely to be endorsed in all the trend-driven music websites, naming no names, of course. Hashtag sponsored content…
But it’s not even remotely experimental. Dark wave often just seems to be shorthand for club kids pilfering their parents’ record collection and going, “Synth pop? Cool”. The fact that the duo have DJ-ed, rather than really played their own music, should be a red flag right there. It’s all too much like a pastiche. There is nothing remotely cutting-edge, nor musically diverting, about this album, bar Abyss, which is vaguely reminiscent of Giorgio Moroder at his moodiest.
You know you are in Vince Noir side project territory when an echo effect is the most radical addition to an album (on the track Circus). There is a track called Robot, I shit you not, which sounds like – no,wait for it – Kraftwerk. Astonishing stuff, how do they dream this shit up?…. Singing “Heart beats fast like a tiny machine” along to every track, and realising that The Mighty Boosh have better riffs than this, is pretty cringe-inducing.
There is music out there which pays homage to the 80s and succeeds. Love Object does not fall under this category. The Chromatics and Glume, both on Italians Do It Better, had a few songs with decent ideas and melodies on their last albums. Fine Place, the most recent project from Frankie Rose, blends the synth pop of Depeche Mode with more ethereal influences like Cocteau Twins and dream-goths Dead Can Dance. Neither Utachka nor Mu possess strong voices, and it’s all treated with parping synths, reverb-y production and something than John Carpenter would have rejected in the studio for being too passe. Back to the decks, ladies.