General Elektriks
Good City For Dreamers
Rating: 2.5/5.0
Label: Disgruntled
Sometimes keyboards overstep their boundaries. On one particular setting, you're able to "pluck" a distorted guitar chord, while an entire canned drumbeat can be conjured by the mere tap on a different key. Creating an entire work derived from this array of false presets and programmed logarithms may be an old concept, but it still requires an immaculate attention to production detail. It's too bad General Elektriks' (a.k.a. RV Salters) production ear is deaf. Even with the (sparse) aid of a small horn and string section, Salters overloads each song with artificial keyboards and samplers beyond an any chance of appreciable listening.
Continuing the vintage electro-R&B crust Cliquety Kliqk initiated, Paris native Salters dishes out another home-baked casserole of Moog-y Euro-lounge. As before, the tunes groove with down-tempo enthusiasm, with the majority of the tracks favoring minor keys that are as tongue-in-cheek as they are eerie. Salters' smooth, boyish voice and falsetto backups add a level of comfort that might otherwise be lost among his haunting pop compositions.
Good City For Dreamers might be overbearing at times in its retro presentation, but what saps its life is the lackluster production. The general aural nutshell inhibits the songwriting's potential. Each track comes off as aesthetically in-your-ear and two-dimensional - arguably on purpose - but the digital processing is a terrible substitute for the true analog compression that his retro approach requires. It sounds like Salters is mocking himself mocking '70s and '80s lite rock and R&B. It's a shame; with such charming and catchy arrangements (the exception being the embarrassingly campy ode to film director David Lynch, aptly titled "David Lynch Moments"), Good City deserves better.
Further inhibiting the narrow palette of song choices, Salters opts to keep relatively similar drum-machine beats throughout Good City. It causes much of the ear candy - as melodic as it is - to putter along instead of delineating the music's direction. "You Don't Listen," for example, fails to achieve any musical climax. "Helicopters" is abundant with buzzing, processed synths so distancing, that they drain any musical essence out of it. This is the problem across the board; the songwriting is there, but the energy doesn't match it.
Everyone knows those stray songs on their local lite FM station. Whether they're B-sides from a '70s act, or just a lost track of the '80s, you happen to catch the song once, then quickly forget the mysterious tune. Good City is comprised of those very songs. "Raid the Radio" may be Salters' blunt outcry against the industry's increasingly stultified radio fare, but the song's poor mixing job makes you realize how paradoxical music can be.
by Jory Spadea
