With
Re: Talking About Memories,
Static starts off with signature elements that make the City Centre Offices catalog so unified: crisp and simple percussion as a bed for swooning electronics and carefully constructed guitar melodies. But when
Hanno Leichtmann drops his vocals on the opening track, "Return of She," all bets about another safe release from CCO are off the table. Throughout the album,
Leichtmann carefully constructs melodies that would make labelmates like
Ulrich Schnauss swoon and shoegaze with envy. This is especially evident on "A Song for You," which resurrects the textures and layers of classic
Slowdive moments and feeds them through a digital effects processor and laptop. This is music for shoegazers who have matured and graduated into adulthood, but still long to revisit the melodies and memories of an era gone by without the sense of nostalgia that often plagues the nu-gazers. And while some electronics purists may disdainfully thumb their noses over
Re: Talking About Memories, this is music that stretches beyond the boundaries of IDM and gives it a much needed electric shock to its hardening arteries. ~ Rob Theakston