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April 20, 2018 - Running Back Records
With The Division, Krystal Klear presents a quandary that lays bare my biggest quandary of electronic music today. The 1980s was the decade of the synthesizer, a golden era when the future of music was believed to be new innovation like the theremin. Perhaps this is because I haven’t lived long enough experience truly drastic transformation in music, but we seem to be living in a past-future imagined by 70s and 80s pop musicians, even in the darkest corners of the music world. So, here’s the question—has techno truly ever left the 20th Century, or are we simply riding one big, musical wave through an era?
If Harry Parsons’ Eden is nostalgic for disco, Krystal Klear’s The Division is nostalgic for Molly Ringwald. Listening makes me feel longing for a fantasy childhood I never had, the kind I could only experience in ratty coming-of-age movies on my old tube tv. It’s punchy, quirky and optimistic, and these songs might be too steeped in vintage sheen to have staying power, but today’s children of yesterday will certainly appreciate it. This is robots celebrating the life of a volleyball at the beach, and we are recording the game from ground-level, from the sand. Summer is a longing, with an energy all its own. Some think the season is delivered by thick, humid air, but I see instead a hazy cloud of potential, of what is and what could have been. In times of upheaval, we look longingly, desperately, back to summers of yore.
Strong responses to art are reactions to strong moves by the artist, and The Division has a tight consistency in instrumentation and musical theme throughout. Cheesy track titles like ‘Division Ave’ and ‘Shockzoid’ transform everyday conversations about this EP into Scooby-Doo quotes for the eavesdroppers. A dense, meaty beat pulses blood through the heart of each song, gluing them together into a single organism, from the innocent naiveté of the melody in ‘Neutron Dance’ to the glittery trance urgency of ‘Shockzoid.’ There is unity in the idea, electricity on the fundamental, atomic level. Krystal Klear gives us something fun and unapologetically lovable.
By the time I got to “Moonshake Miner” during my first listen, I realized that Krystal Klear has created with The Division EP a safe playground of guilty pleasures for us all. He clearly references Whitney Houston with the drum break on this track, showing all his cards for a brief moment and unmasking his appeal. My conscious mind bounces in all black health goth to the effortlessly cool irony of electronic dance music of the present day while my subconscious mind sings “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” in a completely different timeline. Klearly, we all love pop music deep down. Even to be diametrically opposed to pop music is to have been influenced by it. And thank goodness for that, because Krystal Klear has shared with us the opportunity to time travel on Pop the Magic Carpet.
Krystal Klear, a.k.a Dec Lennon, is based in NYC via Dublin, and he runs the label Cold Tonic. The Division EP is available on Running Back Records, if you wanna play with me. Andiamo. ☔