Every artist makes a choice about their boundaries. Some classical performers confine themselves to period instruments. Some folkies insist on making their own fiddle bows or curing their own bodhran skins. Some beergutted provincial blues players decide at the outset to remove any trace of original thought, character or taste from their life’s work. Strawberry Nightmares, along with a fair clump of current musicians, have confined themselves to the stark, flat palette of early computer game music and home synthesiser voices. It’s not quite the Eight-Bit Gameboy sound of DJ Scotch Egg or the Chip Tune glitter of Kid Unicorn, but it exists in a world of cheap dynamics and 2D sounds with minimal attack and delay.
Some of which sounds are, let’s be honest, absolutely wonderful. The synthesised cuica at the opening of ‘My Owl is Broken’, for example, is very pleasing, as is a whole gamut of electronic bleeps and tinkles that pop up throughout ‘Complex Gift’, or the Yello-a-like robot horn consort on ‘Stellar Soldier’. All very nice, but sadly the tracks display very few compositional merits: there are no interesting rhythms, no great melodies or motifs to latch on to, and certainly the concept of developing ideas seems to be anathema to the digital simplicity of the style. By far the best tracks are the Mario-referencing ‘Pipe Speed’ (here in two versions) and ‘Monster Milkshake’, with a crystalline synth line that loosely recalls Yellow Magic Orchestra and some slightly more cohesive drum programming.
However, for the most part, this CD is unsatisfying. It goes out of its way to show us that it is based on the sounds of 1985, but gets nowhere near emulating the qualities of electronic music from this period that’s actually any good. It’s like a man recounting exactly how he laughed, without telling you the joke. There are memories from my childhood in this music, but it’s like Hauntology without being haunting. In fact, the whole LP feels like the musical equivalent of one of those terrible I Love 1983 shows that were all the rage a few years back, with some no mark like John Robb saying, “Oh, oh, I fell off my Chopper and spilt Vimto on my Etch-A-Sketch” for an audience of mindless inebriates whose lives are slipping away from them as they gaze mindlessly backwards. The Eighties throwback tone of this LP might well function as a doorway back to a prelapsarian innocence for somebody frustrated by the contemporary technical world; it might be a good get out for composers who have no harmonic or rhythmic ideas; it might be a giggle for a band of Sugar Ape trendies, who think that recognising something is the same as understanding it; for us, it’s proof that music usually needs more than nice noises.