The Pink Noise Economy of Love LP
Album number eight from Montréal’s long-running art-punk sleaze merchants the PINK NOISE, squarely positioned in the most recent stretch of a timeline that extends through the RED KRAYOLA’s late ’70s Rough Trade cusp, ’80s major label-era PERE UBU (in my head, this LP is what Cloudland could have sounded like if it hadn’t been so blatantly mersh), and the FALL’s discovery of club beats in the early ’90s. Woozy UBU’d synths collide with cut-up Madchester rhythms, while Mark Sauner draws his vocals out in a half-speed Mark E. Smith cadence, pulling Economy of Love‘s nine tracks through a series of seedy and dimly-lit musical back alleys. Top marks go to “Opportunist,” which cruises down the glitter Autobahn with a glammed-up motorik pulse, the layering of some Andy Gill-worthy serrated guitar on top of rattling percussion and swells of acid-psych keyboard on “Wall of Ice,” and “Out of Step,” the grimy benzos-not-coke early ’00s dance punk banger that never was (but should have been).