La Cassette — Left To Our Own Devices
Text from when a debut from the depth of Bandcamp made my day
There are many ways to deal with a leak. One straightforward one is to open the text tap of this place to flow every time a single thing happens on a record label or if any of my favorite people drop a remix of another favorite artist or do a Rihanna cover. And that will turn Gongenhum into a buzz blog, an NME Radar with one gazillionth of readers. And that will be the kind of post-apocalyptic oneiric creature I am not. So I’d like to put tracks in lab environments in which you are equipped with various listening tools: the Moog percentage calculator and the synth density machine among others. Also if there is a collaboration in your remix, we have measurements in our lab for a feature-to-feature analogy. So you needn’t worry about anything you hear here. What you have to push play on is signed, sealed, delivered, affirmative.
One thing I could not resist back in was a debut from Le Cassette, though. This is where all our calculations picnic for a while for it passes any early measurement nimbly. And in the 80s delicatessen Telefuture record label has vetted for us in all its neon blue gracefulness, the latest release heralds a tubular weekend spent in San Luis Obispo in black leather miniskirts.
Le Cassette’s Left To Our Own Devices was in the making for two years. It’s a sort of lost future Bryan Ferry would have imagined. Like many others, I dipped a toe in the single “Electric Paradise” for its hit capacity with a dip of M83’s “Kim & Jessie” in a Cut Copy bowl. But then I was electrolyzed by “Digital Power”, the immediate retro boom after the intro. There is a bit of everything for everyone who’s on their club list. I finally opted for the instrumental “Fighter” for it is the sound of rebirth to all the nocturnal Sega Mega Drive games I jammed in my console slot. This is definitely a very likely candidate for end-year lists as it’s getting harder and harder to skip these tracks as they smoothly rotate heavier and heavier. That is quite an achievement for a 62-min album.
