The Big Pink
A Brief History of Love
4AD / Playground

The Londoners Robbie Furze (Panic DHH, Alec Empire) and Milo Cordell (the man behind the Merok label) in The Big Pink makes their debut as a duo with A Brief History of Love. A melodic and noisy electro-pop album that, at least for this listener, is becoming so much more than just a brief love story.

Sometimes, when there is a lot of buzz about a new band, praising it to be the Next Big Thing, it turns out to be more fuss than actual content. Fortunately this is not the case with The Big Pink. A Brief History of Love is, from the stunning opening track "Crystal Visions", until the closure with "Count Backwords to Ten", everything the hype promised it would be. It is dashingly sexy, poetic and electrifying.

The Big Pink manages to keep an insisting post-romantic feel through-out the album, with peeks on songs like the mesmerizing 80es-colored ballad "Love in Vain", the single "Velvet", which may be one of the most breathtakingly seductive songs this year, and "Tonight". The latter soundscaped in just that up-beat electronica noise that makes the line "Tonight, you take a part of my life" so much more heart-shakingly wanting, but still never unnerving. And that is some of the beauty of The Big Pink; they have all this kliché-like approaches, and then they just add that precious little something. That vibrating nerve that keeps everything in it's right place.

And then it is just to get back on my feet after falling like a domino, and take a bow for The Big Pink. With A Brief History of Love they've delivered the finest, most disturbingly beautiful album of the year.

Copyright © 2009 Aslaug O Klausen