Artist: Private Pact
Title: Perfect people
Genre: New Wave / New Romantic
Release Date: 20th January 2017
Label: Liberte Records
Album Review
Do Danish New Wave band PRIVATE PACT show they have a sneaky sense of humour, despite the somewhat icy tone of new release ‘Perfect People’, by listing DONNA SUMMER alongside JOY DIVISION as “artists we like”? Are we about to hear a whole new kind of dark, synth music tinged with disco and flamboyance?
Opener ‘We Were Young’ however, owes a much greater debt to the sparse, repetitive rhythms of COVENANT, there are cold, dark spaces around the minimalist beats and bleeps and an eerie sense of loss running through it. ‘Cold And Pale’ wanders briefly into mid-period DEPECHE MODE territory, and it’s got just about enough atmosphere to prevent it becoming sterile. A jittery, stuttery urgency fills ‘The Great Display’ but also a feeling that this one would have benefited from a fleshing out. At times it feels like a demo, the ideas are there, but it’s not yet fully clothed.
The big problem here is it’s easy to lose concentration, with not enough memorable moments. At times things are distinctly passionless, almost amateur, as on the sloppy ‘No Shame’, which desperately needs tightening up, and with either much more, or much less, happening behind the vocals, which actually work well when combining male and female voices. Individually, the vocals are a matter of personal taste, weak and almost comically bad on occasion, see the excruciating ‘You Can Exchange Your Hide’. When drenched in echo and pushed into the background, things improve rapidly as on ‘Perfect Love’ although it’s another meandering mess of a song needing a really good kick up its lazy arse.
Things don’t get any better. ‘Collisions’ feels half-cooked, and by now the tinny percussion is just simply irritating. ‘Divine’ aims at pop greatness and is pleasant enough but seems to get bored and go off for a stroll somewhere half way through. Which leaves end song ‘Without Form’ to save the day. It doesn’t. Plodding along in its concrete boots, vocally it seems suddenly to have discovered TINDERSTICKS although there are none of that band’s clever dynamics at play here, and when the song ends there is no sense that you’ve missed something. There’s simply not enough strong material here to make ‘Perfect People’ a good album. Possibly a good EP lurks in there somewhere, but the pace, lack of melody despite the odd burst of something special, and the general feeling of “this will do” renders it irrelevant and entirely none-essential. Perhaps a bit of DONNA SUMMER in there might have just made a difference. Sadly, probably not.
Tracklist
01. We Were Young
02. Cold And Pale
03. The Great Display
04. Diving Down
05. No Shame
06. Better Day
07. You Can Exchange Your Hide
08. Lost In Favours
09. Perfect Love
10. Collisions
11. Divine
12. Without Form
Line-up
Johnathan
Julia
Arjuna
Martin
Website
https://privatepact.org / https://www.facebook.com/privatepact
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 4
Sound: 3
Total: 3.5 / 10
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