junior boys

Birthday

There’s been a flurry of excitement surrounding the Junior Boys – one of those rare moments when the scene forgets about fashion or what it means to belong to one musical clique or another and, instead, brings everything together in a display of warmth, innovation and a love of remarkable tunes. The Junior Boys work around a notion that brims with simplicity, their love of vintage synthpop as produced by John Foxx and Visage offset by their immersion in the beats of Timbaland, Dre and the synth layers of Berlin’s Basic Channel. Hard to imagine how the gulf between these influences can be bridged..and yet this record somehow manages to do exactly that. “Birthday” is, indeed, one of those hum-in-yo-head-till-you-die sort of tunes, but the euphoric nostalgia of the composition rests nervously on the sort of broken beat that most often comes straight out of West London. “Unbirthday”, meanwhile, sees the sort of transformation that could only be equaled if Depeche Mode threw their synths out and jammed with King Tubby and Pole instead. It’s a magnificently deep, spacious, electronic, evocative, mutilated beast of a tune that oozes depth and an understanding of music that just can’t be faked. Cementing this diversity with another spot-on bit of selection, the EP ends with an intricate, painfully structured remix from Fennesz – building the track up from a mess of frozen beats and vocals into a re-configured wall of warm guitars and effervescent distant vocals that conjure up the thought of the Cocteau Twins produced by Kevin Shields at his peak. Really, quite an unbelievable record – something really special is happening here. Unmissable.