I wondered, not very seriously, whether the title to their latest EP, I Fought The Style was a cheeky nod to, of all things, the trap snare that quietly machine-guns its way through opening number and single, Eulogist. Despite the stereotype beat, trap doesn’t win here, which is good when it’s already clogging up everybody else’s drum machine. Eulogist, isn’t trap, but as the bouncing background synths kick on, more like some quasi-house: the kind of thing Seekae were fiddling with, more or less successfully on their last album. Here it’s melded with those same sort of quietly depressive, cold-wave vocals that Spartak have favoured in the past, but in a duet between long-time member Evan Dorian and guest vocalist Bekki Whiton.

The mood of the EP is established at the outset: themes of dark, slightly unsettling intimate encounters, painted murkily through fairly abstract lyrics. Stuff like “A wait to cool my heels / But with a spring in my step / I’ll  make amends if we’re still intertwined / We’ll take the time to fool around again.” It’s all vaguely evocative of some modern, urban romance (especially amongst all these metallic, grinding beats), shot through with unease and uncertainty and dragged down by ennui.

It isn’t all on the dancefloor. The incomprehensibly mutated vocals of Seasonal meander across the track’s wandering nu-jazzish self-indulgence. It sounds a bit like a segue Kanye might come up with and … maybe only he could get away with. As it grows and grows, however, reaching a peak of maximalist intensity, it does have a certain something.

Flags For An Organization picks up where Eulogist left off, though the beats are both slower and more out of control at the same time, dissolving into moments of suffocating shapelessness, while those snares have become contorted into sharp, fuzzy blasts of noise. It’s a bit like triphop, but with a feverish intensity that reaches nearly hysterical levels.

I quite like Revisionist which slides a mid-tempo dance beat under repetitive synths that appear to be mimicking the kind of klaxons you’d hear in an industrial loading bay. It clicks exactly into place with the mood Spartak have established here.

Final cut, Maps Of The Sounds Of Tokyo is the most triphop of all, bringing back Bekki Whitton’s whispery voice, setting it to tinny beats and extremely moody synths and treated strings swelling in the background. It’s a big one too, rolling expansively out to the seven minute mark and letting the tension grow and grow over wailing instrumental solos.

I Fought The Style swells the ranks of Spartak beyond the duo of Shoeb Ahmad and Evan Dorrian, finding extra hands for whatever’s needed on any given song: a drum kit here, slab of electronics there. Appropriately, the result is much lusher than previous Spartak releases, the mood more fully painted in sound. The dark vista they create fits in quite easily with the work of Australian contemporaries like Lower Spectrum or LUCIANBLOMKAMP, although, this being Spartak, they’re probably the most stylistically diverse of the bunch. Dorian and Ahmad are both members of the excellent jazz-beats nutters Tangents and Ahmad in particular has a seemingly endless list of acts on the go: also releasing recordings this year with post-punks Agency and ambient act Sensaround. It’s not surprising there’s so much in the sound of Spartak, which, incidentally, I’ve been listening to longer than any other outfit mentioned here. As I Fought The Style proves, there’s few styles Spartak have come against that they haven’t tamed and added to their repertoire.

- Chris Cobcroft.