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Poo, "Fluorescent"
This is the debut album from the Slovakian duo Poo. With a name like Poo I thought that the album was going to be toilet humour in the style of Anal Cunt, something that might be worth listening to once but ultimately shallow. My preconceptions were nothing but preconceptions, Poo make serious and highly rewarding music.
11 Fingers
The music on Fluorescent is dark and cinematic. It’s easy to visualise scenes of Hitchcock-like suspense and murder to the album. Each track adds a new scene to the story. Will our hero find the killer? Will he survive finding the killer? Should he go up those stairs? And so on. The best part is, each time I listen to it, the script changes depending on what elements of the music I’m paying attention to.
Most of the tracks have sweeping drones and subterranean rumbles underpinning delicate, glassy sounds with pops and glitches adding a touch of spice to the mix. "Rentip" and the annoyingly named "::.:" sometimes stray onto well worn paths, at times Fluorescent sounds like Dockstader or Fennesz, but the majority of the tracks are captivating. “Sol” is one of the highlights, combining atmospheric and stratospheric sounds with radio waves (hence the Dockstader comparison) to create a warm and pleasant ambience, perhaps the love scene in my mind’s movie.
The album reaches a climax with the phenomenal “Amt,” which builds up with a looped drum line and what sounds like a squadron of fighter jets revving their engines. Listening to this on headphones made the sounds come alive. This is definitely the action scene. What impressed me with Fluorescent is how coherent the album is. Despite “Amt” being a lot more active than the rest of the album, Poo links the entire album together by using a restricted palette of sounds used on this and the other tracks. Tracks like “Inkleva” and “Almofun Suelr” are distinctly different pieces of music but they are undeniably cut from the same cloth.
Fluorescent is a promising debut for Poo. It is well-assembled and enjoyable to listen to. There are multiple layers to the music; depending on the time of day or mood I was in I ended up picking up on different threads running through the tracks. Fluorescent is by no means a classic album but it is an album that I will be returning to.
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