SpartakFive Points
Feral Media

- Are you a Spartak fan of old? Did you get down to the Canberra / Sydney trio’s outer-limits jazziness, nod your head to sounds like a plague of spiders sneaking across a drum kit? If that kind of glitch groove is your thing then you may not be entirely into what’s coming next, but I’m sure that the Necks will be putting out yet another record some time soon, so, on your bike.

If you have been paying attention to things Spartak, you’ll have seen the change coming: a very advance single, Catch/Control, which landed early last year. The frisky, malfunctioning beats might have thrown you off if you only listened to the first twenty seconds, but then the synth sheen sets in and Shoeb Ahmad’s baritone starts moaning something exhausted about creepy sexual dysfunction.

They claim to have been influenced by Kompakt, the LA beat scene, Shackleton & Hood, which is -in a sense- hilariously broad, but does gather around a sound of dark and brooding, no-nonsense beat experimentation and, ah, the indie-art-pop noodling of Hood, I guess. What they don’t mention, like a big, hipster elephant in the corner of the room is the slick and menacing coldwave stylings that are all over this EP. Whether you compare them to Joy Division or HTRK there are many such comparisons to be made and, really, there’s a few people doing it at the moment, but so what?

I’m serious, because Five Points is every bit as stylishly chilly as the artists it borrows from. Moreso, it takes the best bits of Spartak’s jazzy, glitchy, proto-industrial horror and machines it into a backing for their new sound and it will have sweat standing out on the back of your neck even though you’re only dancing so very minimally. Opening track, On Conditions, is an archetypal example. Synth-toms and electronic snares thump away against a droning synth, before something that sounds like an auto-lathe working away inexorably starts grinds across the track. Throw in vox that sound like they’re delivered by an exhausted androgyne and, bam, we’re done. Or we would be, but Spartak generously deliver echoing handclaps and a coda of tribal drums that are seriously exciting. Enough already, I’ll join your machine cult, where do I insert the neural jack?

Across five cuts of densely, timbreally packed synth-post-punk, Spartak never let up the tension. There’s a sensation of brutal exhaustion, but that you can’t stop until these machine-like rhythms are done with you.

Five Points has got me thinking about Spartak. When bands like PVT emerge from the shadows, try and cross over into something that ears outside of New Weird Australia might be down with, well, often I can take it or leave it. Not this time, though, this time I want in. Maybe that’s the hipster kiss of death for Spartak: I mean, I don’t know what kind of cut these coldwave synth-droids will have with Australian kids. Oh it should cut through though, maybe they just need some help? If you just hold the listening public down while I perform a few incisions, here and here, embed the chips and start threading in the wires…

- Chris Cobcroft.

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