New Patterns Prom Dresses

Playing on Prefix is a attribute on KCRW’s Music Blog in which writers from the diverse music site Prefix hip that you what’s coming out of their pc speakers each week.

Much has been manufactured of a late-’00s goth revival, and in his or her typical cringeworthy fashion, Internet hype artists coined the term “severe wave” to describe the indie world’ersus recent influx of tragedy and gloom.

While this may conjure up nightmarish visions of Robert Cruz hairstyles and high school scaremongering, it’s actually produced some pretty great music: elegant, high-concept, and also (though the asymmetrical coifs and non colored documents stylings may fool you) extremely modern.

Observe Automelodi, the invention of Montreal’s Xavier Paradis and one of many well-heeled coldwave acts on Brooklyn’s Strange Records.

Automelodi’s eponymous full-length is a diligently curated collection of post-punk gems — alongside Chad (Just Frank) and Xeno & Oaklander, one of many impressive, early-’80s-style LPs from Wierd a year ago. (It’s all too tempting to share with you the label as a type of collective, singlehandedly guarding the church of virtually forgotten synth groups.)

What distinguishes Paradis from their labelmates, most crucially, is his well-tuned ear for pop. Although Automelodi’s songs are because icy as they come — the stress of “Stylo-Bille,” for example, or the undercuent involving pounding percussion on “Rayons De Rien” — it’azines all done with a romantic, Italo disco grow that’s infectious and dance-floor all set.

“Buanderie Jazz” is the album’s most usually indie cut, a piece of C86-style pop with moody guitars drenched in reverb along with the omnipresent throb of Paradis’s workstation work. One of Automelodi’s most immediate highlights, it’s gained new bounce in a remix simply by Plastic Flowers.

Stream “Buanderie Jazz” remix

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Plastic Flowers is the one-man nom de plume of Tallahassee’s Sean Earl Mustache, whose own brand of synthy dream-pop makes him a darling of Internet-era DIY. He’s re-imagined “Buanderie Jazz” as a fanciful blend of earworm-quality Bronski Beat synths and Zilch!-era Death in June percussion — that is to say, it’s a playful, disco-ready summary of 21st-century new wave.

Though unsigned, Plastic-type material Flowers has captured the hard-to-impress hearts of New York’s insular synth professional; he’ll be playing the show at the Delancey with Impression Response and Dream Extramarital relationship on March 25, indicating that this new era of coldwave offers legs well into springtime.

By Hilary Beck