We Love / ‘We Love’
CD / MP3; Bpitch Control
Released 13th September 2010
The first album from oddball Italian electro producers We Love is full of surprises. And not just because it’s saturated in mid-90s trip hop, reefer breakbeat and similar, non-dance floor focused electronic genres.
That said there’s little doubt that Escape Destination takes inspiration from Ibiza house, and closer White March makes the fact that the release comes from Ellen Allien’s Bpitch Control more understandable. But to put these and the other four to the floor moments aside, the overriding atmosphere of the album is one part Eastern mystique, two parts deep downbeat electronica.
The self-titled debut from Florentines Giorgia Angiuli and Piero Fragola is a showcase of serious production talent, and heart breaking, often child scaring send-return and solo vocals. It’s as difficult to describe as it is to decipher, but consider what a Gothic electro mantra sung by two meditating Casio and Korg holy-people would sound like and you’re close to the money.
The staccato percussion stabs and eerie synths in Hide Me, and the vocal loops and plucked guitars of Even If are enough to unsettle you, and provide the most sinister example of the depths this pair are prepared to take you to. But as if aware of the potential to cause less adventurous listeners to press eject, there’s light to be found in and amongst the darkest of places, offering contrast and hope.
Northern Exposure-era progressive breakbeat is dished out like a medicine to counteract that same disease that caused Massive Attack listeners of a nervous disposition to visit therapists following 100th Window. Underwater exposes Fragola’s talent as lead lyricist, and although clouds hang heavy overhead throughout it’s a more human track that suggests a yearning desire rather than suspicious motives.
Elsewhere No Train, No Plane should rightly wind up in the record box of Michael Mayer et al, such is the quality of this plodding, trance-influenced number. Filters spray 303s into imagined horizons while Angiuli’s panned siren-like chorus promises a bright future for the latest additions to Europe’s mask-wearing, live dance fraternity. And based on this it would be well deserved.
There are few people making music remotely like We Love. And less still that would dare to create such a collection of tracks that cannot be pigeonholed, and then stick the lot on their first long-player. A beast as downtempo as it is filled with left of the field, heads down club and bar potential, with such widespread appeal it’s surprising more pre-release fuss hasn’t been made by the wider press.
