Reviews

Efficient Space

Karen Marks Cold Café 12″

KAREN MARKS’s one-and-done 7″ from 1981 is a mysterious minimal wave dream, and it’s been a highly sought-after (and very expensive) artifact of the Australian ’80s underground for quite some time now—the A-side’s lost love lament “Cold Café” has popped up on a number of compilations in the last few years focused on outsider synth-pop and small-press post-punk obscurities, although the new Cold Café anthology 12″ on the Melbourne-based Efficient Space label is the first proper reissue of MARKS’s slim recorded output. In addition to both songs from the original 7″, the expanded EP also includes two recently discovered and otherwise unreleased demo recordings, plus the studio track “You Bring These Things,” previously only available on a scare promo-only compilation LP. “Cold Café” is obviously the centerpiece here, though, hitting a raw, emotional nerve with yearning vocals backed by a sparse rhythm machine pulse and percolating synth, all cloaked in otherworldly space echo like one of JOE MEEK’s off-kilter 60s girl-group productions translated into an ’80s art-wave context. “Won’t Wear It for Long” and “Problem Page” both take things in a slightly less ethereal direction, almost verging on traditional synthed-out new wave, but still indelibly colored by the haunting sense of longing in MARKS’s delivery. An absolutely crucial archival rescue!

Skeet Simple Reality LP

SKEET’s backstory is a familiar one in narratives of early ’80s UK DIY—band forms in a mid-sized industrial city, plays a handful of shows, records some songs at home with the aid of very modest technology, then dissolves before actually releasing anything—but their stark, bewitching post-punk isn’t so typical. Simple Reality rounds up eight once-lost tracks, half from a 1981 demo and half from a soundboard tape of the trio’s final live performance later that year (which was apparently on top of a trailer outside of a pub beer garden?!), with the sharp, pitch-perfect quality of the latter almost indistinguishable from the former. YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS would be an easy and not inaccurate comparison, from the steady pulse of the Roland CR-8000 serving as SKEET’s mechanical drummer to Kay Booth’s fragile vocals and introspective lyrics, and while the yearning minimalism of “Brief Call” and “Alone Tonight” is colossally Colossal Youth, “Young Girls” and “Avril in the Alps” ramp up the digital tempo ever so slightly and dig into a scratchy, bass-forward danceability somewhere between ORANGE JUICE and JOSEF K on the Postcard Records wavelength, and the paper-thin bedroom pop strum of “I Was Never Told” bridges the very narrow gap between the MARINE GIRLS and SOLID SPACE, juxtaposing Kay’s sweet and airy delivery with the song’s blunt, direct subject matter (“Did you want just for sex / Or simply someone to hold”). Beguiling and beautiful.