Pitchfork

In his review of Tujiko Noriko's From Tokyo to Naigara, fellow PFM writer Nitsuh Abebe placed an umbrella over ambient indie popsters who use delicate electronic melodies to convey the wistful yet wounded sensations that were once frequently articulated by jangly guitars and boy/girl vocals. Nitsuh gathered half of the Morr Music roster, Solvent, and Ulrich Schnauss, among others, and made them compatriots in a sort of un-named movement of bedroom electronica-- a marriage of indie sentiment and sensibility with sleepy laptop-driven melodies.

In one sense, the Junior Boys fit here as well. On the EP's two vocal tracks, "Birthday" and "Last Exit", singer Jeremy Greenspan's fragile vocals relay lovelorn lyrics soaked in indie's too-familiar, almost inevitable cycle of pain and resignation. "Take all this weight behind me/ And let it go," he pleads on "Birthday", trying to come to grips with rejection and strip himself of some of its debilitating weight. And yet, in another more engaging and encouraging sense, Junior Boys don't fit that lap-pop model at all. Pigeonholing Junior Boys amongst most of those artists negates their considerable command of more complex rhythms, as well as their grasp of dance and avant-pop traditions.

Sonically, Junior Boys have condensed a large group of very apparent touchstones from (deep breath) Timbaland's icier more futurist production work to the texture and syncopation of two-step pioneers such as Todd Edwards and Dem 2 to the shimmer of early 80s synth-pop to Basic Channel's blissful tech-dub. In the process, they've created an alchemic sound that, after only one EP, is both identifiable and unique.

Of the EP's other three songs, the graceful romanticism of "Birthday" spills over to "Last Exit", seven minutes of swoon and sigh, dance grooves and bedsit mournfulness, in which Greenspan whispers things like "you make me feel more than real" over a heart-tugging shiver of sound. The instrumental "Unbirthday" echoes the ghosts of a scrum between Herrmann & Kleine's "Kickboard Girl", Rhythm & Sound, and dubstep. And the EP closes with possibly its most immediately striking track, a Fennesz remix of "Last Exit". The Austrian star leaves the track's pop heart intact and offers it a series of trembling electroshocks.

Despite that accomplished second half of the record, it's those two vocal tracks that nicely highlight the band's strength: effortlessly bleeding their songcraft into groove and rhythm, creating a delicate sculpture of broken dreams and beats. Sure, plenty of glitch or tech-house pioneers have tried the same in recent years, but they've mostly rushed arms wide open to disco-pop, swinging swiftly from clicks and cuts to digital disco. Surprisingly-- until this EP-- only Coloma and Vladislav Delay's Luomo project have attempted to bridge that gulf and position themselves somewhere between those two poles with any success. In an odd way, then, it's those three (Junior Boys, Coloma, Luomo)-- each of whom sound far less like the most frequently resurrected memories of "80s music"-- that best capture the elegance and sophistication in some of that decade's synth-pop.

I almost hesitate to even mention that decade because the inherently selective nature of revivalism already gives specific connotations to anything that is either electronic or reminiscent of the 1980s. But never mind the prevailing cycle of today's nostalgia. Junior Boys don't come across like the more synthetic, decadent end of electroclash. Instead, they trade in the slightly scuffed sheen of the decade's more heartfelt soundscapes, delivering tracks for the day after the disco-- soundtracks to mental slideshows of good times, the paradoxically cold reality of daylight, and the potential pain of wondering how soon is now.