Friday 24 February 2012

Recommended music: 'Aurora' by Weird Gear


There are a lot of albums around these days that sound like they wish they'd been made in the 80s. But now Essex band WeirdGear have taken things up a notch by making a record that sounds like it actually was made in the 80s, and has been languishing in a basement somewhere waiting to be discovered (maybe Jamie Oliver found it with those Joy Division & New Order masters and guns that he recently exhumed. If you were around at the time this is the kind of record that will make you nostalgic for Atari consoles, Commodore 64 computers and Yamaha DX-7s (if you weren't, look them up on Wikipedia to see what you missed.

Unusually for an electronic act the band record and play live, using only analogue equipment, which is the reason for this record sounding so much like something that's just fallen through a warp hole and smuggled itself onto your laptop. So whilst there are occasional hints of Kraftwerk in the music, their live shows are certainly more spontaneous than their Teutonic ancestors.

Standout tracks are probably opener 'Heat of the Midday Sun' with its electronic vocals, the instrumental 'Holding On' which sounds a lot like a Goldfrapp backing track, and 'Game' which starts off all Blade Runner quickly turns into an electro-stomper.

This is apparently the first of 2 albums we can expect from WeirdGear this year, as they've been hard at it in the studio for months. The album is released on Monday and is, as you'd expec in 2012t, available from all good stores (but sadly not Woolworths, which is where you would've bought it from in 1982).

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