So So Modern
‘Crude Futures’
(Transgressive)

Unlike The Modern, whose name made light of their unabashedly retro magnificence, there’s absolutely no way this Kiwi crew could have existed at any time other than the turn of this decade. So the hypnotic percussive gamesmanship of Battles drives ‘Be Anywhere’, a fundamentally Foalsian structural ethic informs ‘Holiday’, and the vocals make calling their first EP ‘Friends And Fires’ seem like no accident. They’re at their best, though, when they combine all these influences, as on ‘Island Hopping/Channel Crossing’, or overlook them altogether – see the apocalyptic instrumental urgency of mid-80s the Killing Joke-like ‘Life In The Undergrowth’ or the towering edifice of math and post-rock that is ‘Berlin’. A few more of the latter, and their prospects’d really look obscenely great.

Iain Moffat