Seattle synth duo, Sugar Addikt, take elements from 70’s disco, 80’s mainstream pop, 90’s dance music and 21st-century electronica and use those wide-ranging influences to forge music that is both familiar and infectious yet unique and forward-thinking. Shackles, from their latest ep, Phoenix, is a song that wanders between pulsating dancefloor energy and the highly stylized Vogue vibe of New York’s 80’s nightspots, sonic highs and understated lows.

It mixes conversational, sultry vocals, skittering beats and weaves of synth textures to create a sound that ebbs and flows between euphoric dance grooves and subdued, alternative electronica.

It acknowledges the past whilst building new sonic futures, it wanders the underground pathways of the alternative dance scene whilst appealing to the more discerning tastes of the mainstream pop picker. And the real charm of Shackles is that it does all of this through only the most spacious and selective sonic elements. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. Never was that more true than here.

Previous articleLost Boy – The BRKN (reviewed by Dave Franklin)
Next articleThe Shadow – Drifters In Vellichor (reviewed by Dave Franklin)
Musician, scribbler, historian, gnostic, seeker of enlightenment, asker of the wrong questions, delver into the lost archives, fugitive from the law of averages, blogger, quantum spanner, left footed traveller, music journalist, zenarchist, freelance writer, reviewer and gemini. People have woken up to worse.

1 COMMENT

Leave a Reply