2013-04-09
| THE QUIETUS / UKREVIEW: OFF THE RECORD
By JR Moores
(...) To the remnants of his old group's sounds, Bartos adds a harsher, almost oppressive industrial edge which even threatens to tumble into noise music at around the two-minute mark, when he hurls a bag of swirling, tempestuous fuzzery into the mix. What better way to mark his return? (...)
(...) The marks that Kraftwerk left on Bartos' psyche are explored deeper on 'Without A Trace of Emotion'. It sounds like an undemanding New Order-ish techno-pop ditty. (...)
(...) 'The Tuning of the World' embarks on atheistic soul searching. (...) If ambiguously, the last line hints that this could be a love song, and one sung not to a gas-based lighting fixture, computerised abacus or European rail network, but to something that Kraftwerk would never have allowed: another human being. (...)
(...) Unlike Kraftwerk's heyday when German musicians felt compelled to eradicate the past by creating innovative styles and revolutionary, gadgetry-inspired future-sounds, and unlike the current Kraftwerk incarnation which, absent of original material, is content to linger in galleries as a petrified artefact of its earlier achievements (as impressive as their multimedia live extravaganza may be), Off The Record shows Bartos looking backwards in order to propel himself forwards. The past, present and future collide in a sublime celebration of technology, history and humanity, in all its flawed and triumphant glory, filtered through one man's attempts to understand and explain his small but significant place in the interconnected, universal whole. (...)
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