My Review: The Slow Readers Club - Modernise

 The Slow Readers Club - Modernise

The world retains only one beauty: that of not giving in.

It takes incredible strength to live within this enthusiasm, which is often not credible, given the infinite mass of violence that makes it almost ugly and unsustainable. And the residence of this beauty reveals contradictions that become turbid and weaken breaths, without even the appearance of credibility...

Manchester the grey, the city intoxicated by fragile technological tendencies, by impulses towards the absolute destruction of a glorious past, the new liberal town connected to a heavy Americanisation, has among its citizens four guys who know how to mediate perfectly and reduce the disaster with an attitude between the progressive and the conservative. And, in their constant artistic growth, they are able to connect the human one with looks, techniques, dreams and skills that translate talent into a house full of every necessary treasure, managing to guard what could be lost outside. But their greatest power is precisely that of making the goods of their hive available to the world without seeing a single drop of their honey consumed.

Their advance towards trajectories that may include evolutions, variations, comebacks and futuristic leaps is unstoppable: a new example is their new single Modernise, the last available moment before their forthcoming sixth studio album Knowledge Freedom Power, to be released on 24 February.

They push totally towards the dark electro by means of which, with Cavalcade, they had begun to make the hearts of many full of colour and pregnant with admiration, with in addition a greater shrewdness in the production phase, establishing the irresistible contact of a revisited melodic grip and nourished with modern expansions. And here all the electronic music reveal the composed, ordered, skeletal and flexible side of Aaron Starkie, who takes the reins of the Mancunian band, to drag the other comrades in a renovation that gains freshness and new stylistic references.

Modernise is a hypnotic and aggressive dance, full of electronic cuts, as paralyzing as possible, to amaze and stun, like a mantra that takes your attention away from everything else. Beginning with ebm prodomes, the track is a poisonous bark that establishes what the previous single (which gives the album its title) had anticipated: there is a new lifeblood that seems to have come out of the bizarre alleys of Manchester, from offices in search of a remedy to boredom.

Aaron becomes the messenger of that infectious positivity, at a time when that word has sown upheaval, taking everything out of the starting blocks towards a decisive dash into the future.

The multiplicity of compromises among the band members is adorable, as are the individual alternations that spread the song in the territory of evident control of the parts. The whole is vitaminic, a resource for new reflections and for turning our backs on the grey and chiaroscuro of our existences. Loaded with nuances, with a conscious will that pushes the refusal to be the consequence of one's past, the song offers beats, tricks and lines that are irreverent in respect of those who have settled on clichés devoid of fertility and modernity. 

The message for what will be the first song of the new album is very clear (the four guys have never lacked courage, let's admit it), with an opening towards the theme of work, a renewed identity that gives us the possibility of living, for a modernisation that is more necessary and inevitable than ever, a mental chip that must constantly be updated.

In conclusion: what will be one of the most brilliant albums of 2023 has just given the world a single to make love to, smiling...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

4th January 2023

https://open.spotify.com/track/2q1ckY10MNAl8GvALWWELK?si=r4wF0XopTjC-86Fmq0Wp0g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah7AXp6FMK4&t=52s