Lust For Youth is the progeny of Soft Cell and of Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough,” torn across the bleak dance landscape of the 1990s and into the sampler-crazed early aughts. Though Lust For Youth’s Hannes Norrvide is fiercely reverent of his forebears, he manages to advance their sound to where it ought to be in 2013, rather than simply offer an album of nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Lust For Youth’s is almost a post-modern take on synthpop, and Perfect View is like a critique of its own place within the genre’s genealogy. Norrvide recognizes the bleak and barren aspects of synthetic dance music, and even celebrates them; the result is a coherent album that is smartly out of step with other, more sample-heavy synth acts, but Perfect View is hardly the re-invigoration we’ve been waiting for.
Early into the album’s second track, “Breaking Silence” we are treated to a series of triple note arpeggios that do not sound unlike someone puckering their lips in front of a vocoder. Set over a slightly decaying synth line, and under belligerent, almost brogueing vocals that could have been ripped straight from a Crowded House song, we are treated to the album’s most deliberately new wave track. As with everything on Perfect View, “Breaking Silence” sounds distant and filtered. “Another Day” is an even scummier, sparser take on mid-80s pencil jean machismo, and the song can only evoke images of nearly empty dance halls with cigarette smoke hanging just under the rafters and stage lights that are filtered through cheap cellophane. There is hardly a human element to Perfect View, and some of the sample-based tracks like “Barcelona” sound more assembled than performed.
The heart stopping centerpiece and title track “Perfect View” feels like the most genuine emotional reconciliation of the synthesizer music Lust For Youth is in debt to and the affordable synthesizers and virtual samplers he has at his disposal. The song is essentially a seven minute vamp on an almost clumsily standard danced beat, but it’s the transitions between choked, guttural samples and “Heroes”-esque keyboard melodies that gives the track some legitimate momentum. As the beat fades into a distorted vocal sample that reminds me of nighttime in the woods, we are given a firm reminder of what year it actually is. At least until the next track, “Vibrant Brother,” kicks off with a synth line and fogged out drum beat that are cloaked in New Order. Perfect View is a delicately pieced together album, with a very agreeable momentum. Its shortcomings stem mostly from an inability on Norrvide’s part to step entirely into the fore and take more aggressive control of his own musical destiny. He sounds inhibited, and though the results are mostly very lovely and very tight, the album’s pop moments seem to be stuck squarely in a 20th century definition of fun.
3.5/5 bars
