Style of Eye Duck, Cover & Hold
Though actively releasing singles for half a decade, Swede Linus Eklöw made major headway with […]
Though actively releasing singles for half a decade, Swede Linus Eklöw made major headway with last year’s “The Big Kazoo.” Its pinched switchback filters perfectly complemented its label, Claude VonStroke’s dirtybird Records. The associations are still especially obvious on “Girls” and this disc’s title track, drawing together a brassy, jackin’, choppy tech-funk and intoxicated melodies. “Girls” twitters unabatingly but pleasurably, while “Pad Problems” navigates a surprisingly less frothy tract, placing gravity on the kick, but heft on sonorous chords. Most unexpected are the Italo-meets-trance tropes populating “Number Two,” which begins as if a conversation spoken in binary and ends up pure blow-up U41A. There’s variety, built using synth trills as an accellerant, or a slathering of portamento–anything to remain animated.