memoryland

Album review

CFCF's brilliant 2019 release Liquid Colours channeled the brief moment around the turn of the millennium when electronic dance music, particularly drum'n'bass, regularly soundtracked commercials and movie trailers. With Memoryland, Mike Silver dives even further into his formative years, encompassing a wider spectrum of what the press dubbed "electronica" at the time, as well as major-label alternative rock and post-grunge. Essentially, it sounds like a lovingly reconstructed amalgamation of at least two-thirds of everything Spin magazine raved about in 1998, yet like, say, Daft Punk's incorporation of vintage disco and funk samples, it's refracted through decades of hindsight. The brief "Punksong" has nothing to do with the original wave of punk, and everything to do with what punk meant to someone born well after that era, having more in common with the song titled "Punk" on the first Gorillaz album than the Ramones. The record's 72-minute running time purposefully nods to the excessiveness of the CD era, throwing in as many ideas as possible and seeing what sticks (although if Silver really wanted to step back in time, the quiet song that ends the album would've been followed by ten minutes of silence and a hidden noise experiment). This is especially evident on the album's longer, suite-like tracks. The title of "Life Is Perfecto" references Paul Oakenfold's label, and the track itself features choppy breaks and pulsating guitars, equally indebted to the Smashing Pumpkins and the Chemical Brothers. "Nostalgic Body" is heavier on trance arpeggios (not unlike certain moments on Silver's 2017 Cascades EP, with Jean-Michel Blais) and raging breakbeats, but the Oneohtrix Point Never synths and footwork kick drums indicate that the track couldn't have been made before the 2010s. "Night/Day/Work/Home" is an overt homage to Beaucoup Fish-era Underworld, and "Self Service 1999" is bubbly, filter-heavy house in the vein of Cassius and Basement Jaxx. "After the After" unabashedly embraces U.K. garage, with smooth acoustic guitars sliding over swinging, syncopated beats and Silver's fuzzy vocals singing about living inside a memory. Two songs feature guest appearances from contemporaries who have also interpreted the music from the Y2K era in their own ways. No Joy contribute a fashion monologue to "Model Castings," a dreamy fusion of Sonic Youth guitars and "Windowlicker" glitches, and Kero Kero Bonito's Sarah Bonito sweetly promises "I'll see you again in the next dimension" during the euphoric "Heaven," which sneakily incorporates a Breeders guitar lick. With Memoryland, CFCF looks back on a time when the future seemed limitless, reflecting on the promise of youth and how it's panned out so far.
© Paul Simpson /TiVo