Wednesday, March 08, 2006

The handsome structure

Supersystem's New Album.

When Amy and I were just first dating, she made me these great mix tapes that had a couple of tracks from El Guapo's Super/System on 'em, and I loved the music. It was, in fact, one of the big reasons that I fell for her— she had great taste. And people with great taste have to be awesome, right? Well, in her case, that worked out. El Guapo was even going to play live in Detroit, and we thought about going to see 'em for our third date. Instead, we stayed here and she took me to her room to show me her 'zines. I maintain that it was a cunning plot to lure me up there, but she doesn't like it when I talk like that.

Anyway, she moved away for a year, and while she was gone, El Guapo put out a pretty mediocre follow-up called Fake French, which played into the worst tendencies of the nascent electroclash "movement." I picked up an older album, which had some of Super/System's songs done without the electronics, and really liked 'em. We've since seen them live a couple of times and found out that their very first album is a pretty boring emo-core drudge. So, it seems like they're a group that's only going to have one great album ever.

Anyway, a thread on Metafilter comes up, and I mention 'em. Somebody else lets me know that they've changed their name and some of the personelle. I track down the whole album, streaming, which is above. It's, well, y'know how they kidna jumped the electroclash bandwagon? Yeah, well, they're kinda at the tail-end of the post-punk/dancing-indie wagon now. Which is a shame, because the album is decent but not spectacular, and the weirdness is pretty well relegated to side corners. Which, honestly, should make them as popular as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, but whatever. I give it a 6/10. Good, but not great, and not really worth buying.

Anyone wanna disagree?

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