When Blue Hawaii make an album, they're on a mission to transform pain into evocative electronic pop. After taking some time to rediscover themselves as friends and collaborators, Raphaelle Standell-Preston and Alexander "Agor" Cowan turned the end of their romantic partnership into their debut album, Untogether. It was a process that laid the groundwork for Tenderness, which explored the all-too-real heartache that followed the end of Standell-Preston's largely online relationship. The healing -- both emotional and physical -- continues on Open Reduction Internal Fixation, a set of songs that came about when Cowan injured his heel so badly that he had to return to Montreal from Germany to have the surgery that gives the album its title. Meanwhile, Standell-Preston was recovering from another bad breakup. Despite, or perhaps because of all this suffering, this is some of the duo's most joyous music. It's also some of their most danceable. Not only do Standell-Preston and Cowan revisit and expand on Tenderness' house and disco influences, they join artists as diverse as Hot Chip and Jenny Hval in their embrace of late-'80s and early-'90s dance sounds. Blue Hawaii flirt with trance on "On a High," where strobing synths help the track live up to its name, and offer a blurry, reverb-drenched interpretation of house on "All That Blue," the closest they've come to a dancefloor anthem. They make their longing for bygone days and sounds explicit on Open Reduction Internal Fixation's bookends: "All the Things" begins the album by melding vintage dance and R&B sounds into a dreamy meditation about an on-again, off-again relationship; "Can We Go Back" ends the album with sweet reflections on the past. In between, Blue Hawaii prove that they've kept all the hazy sensuality that's defined their music since 2010's Blooming Summer EP -- and that they now have more ways of expressing it. On the bubbling grooves of "Trust" and "Boileau" and the rhapsodic pop of "Sparkle" and "Still I Miss U," Standell-Preston and Cowan exorcise the last remnants of heartache with enduring grace.
© Heather Phares /TiVo