This threesome from Exeter, UK, makes such sleepy, addictive music that it might as well call itself Heroin. Just try and dislodge its new CD, Manual, from your disc player from your disc player once you’ve aurally injected it. You’ll find yourself copping for that Appliance fix three, four times a day. The band itself might be straighter than the Queen Mum, but its music is habit-forming. Guitarist-vocalist James Brooks’s sultry, deadpan singing only coaches the drug metaphor, bearing a strong resemblance to Lou Reed’s performances circa the Velvet Underground’s Nico-afflicted period.
Manual offers listeners more than a sugary opiate haze, however. Appliance wears its space-rock and Kraut-rock influences on it sleeve, admitting freely to a history rife with Neu and Can use. A squad of synth tweekers at heart, the group peppers its refreshingly concise power-trio compositions with incursive Moog accents and homemade tone-generator drones. On tracks like “Pacifica” and “Pre-Rocket Science,” they lift sonorous guitar lines and one-note keyboard hums straight from the less self-conscious moments on Stereolab’s Mars Audiac Quintet.
For all its knob-twiddling and pop sedation, Appliance manages to avoid becoming another post-rock clone. Oh, sure, the band’s name and predilection for song titles like “Heroes of Telemark,” “Food Music”and “Enjoy Your Nutrition” tap the same vein of ironic ’50s kitsch that’s de rigeuer amongst no-wavers, post-rockers and exotica revivalists. But while many members of the drone-and-bleep club like to trance out with lengthy explorations of decaying chords and overlapping waves of feedback, none of the songs on Manual clock in anywhere near six minutes. The brevity works to the band’s advantage, forcing it to use only the sweetest bits of sound candy strewn about the album. “Enjoy Your Nutrition” packs its two and a half minutes with more than enough percolating bass, shimmering guitar work and seductive vocals to keep listeners from feeling short-changed. “Pacifica” decorates its melody with a chiming three-note guitar line laid over a gorgeously sparse synthesizer backdrop. Even the instrumental intro, “Soft Landing,” makes good use of its two minutes, balancing nursery school sweet keyboard pings with bowel-shuddering bass levels.
In its concise arrangements and choice of equipment, Appliance resembles a less confrontational version of its Mute label-mates Add N to X. Again, subtle differences abound that distance Appliance from the pack. While Add N to X assaults dance-floor mavens with brutal beats and frenetic bursts of electro-static, Appliance serenades the wallflowers with mechanically steady rhythms that anchor a suavely restrained avant-pop wall of sound. This lack of aggression occasionally translates into a lack of oomph. Manual could do with a screamer or two, if only to mix things up a bit. Thankfully, the band’s song-length economy allows the album to stand on the right side of the line dividing track-to-track sameness from consistency. And while nothing on Manual pokes or prods at the listener, it finds its niche as a comfortable album, sincere and warm but droll enough to preclude any posing. A drug in music form? Manual is the nearest approximation we’ve heard in months.
Sean Flinn | November 5, 2000
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