Signer: Next We Bring You The Fire

I came within inches of putting a track by the New Zealand band Signer on a Friday Finds a few months back and then decided it was too sleepy or something.  That was stupid of me.  Their newish (Sept) record, Next We Bring You The Fire out on Carpark may drift in and out of electronic psychedelia, woozy somnolence brought on by exaggerated LFOs, walls of lydian tuned aggregates, and a voice nearly as slim as a sine wave, but the details of its makings are fully aware and its construction, though not always well conceived, on the whole, cogent.  A contemporary Cocteau Twins comes to mind, though not nearly as fey, which is saying less about Signer's inherent groundedness than it does about the extreme airiness of Cocteau Twins.  The real winner here is a track called "+Kicks and Kicks", which swaggers in a barbiturate induced trip across a dance floor, knees locked then buckling, faceless heads bobbing, moaning, glowing, and a mild case of claustrophobia that creeps and creeps.  "Languidly Toot" is a far more exalted example, swerving perhaps a bit close to shoegaze, and needs a third section, but altogether gorgeous nonetheless (why did they withhold that blastbeat till the last 20 seconds, and then only use it once??)  The album on the whole could use more bouts of this kind of thing (by that I mean adrenaline).  The one place we really get it is on the too long "Don't Be A Forest Cow" which dips into the Teengirl Fantasy/Pictureplane model of muscular, astrally disturbed house, but here it drags somehow despite being the fastest song on the record, the four on the floor kick feels out of place with the listless vocals, or maybe the drums are just too clean, and when the acid bass line comes in it is suddenly the most insensitive moment on an album full of florid, otherworldly sensitivities.  On "We Should Touch Teeth" the initial scape is mulled over unnecessarily, but when we get somewhere, a sufficiently massive tribalized rave sequence is deserving of interest, if a little forced.   Next We Bring You The Fire is perhaps not a crucial record, but otherwise it's a finely tuned likeness of where electronic pop is, and where it's going in the late oughts. 

Signer - +Kicks and Kicks

Signer - Languidly Toot

Signer - Don't Be a Forest Cow

Signer - We Should Touch Teeth