A fairly quick return for the up and coming Swedish Electronic/Disco band, following the super funky and Chic-like debut, ‘Destiny No. 20’, from last June.
The duo channel 80s disco so well I’ve been looking forward to this one ever since. No lyrics this time, just thumping, driving traditional dance floor pop with a latter day club twist.
As our well-educated readers will know, ‘Autostrada’ is Italian for motorway and I’m delighted to report there is no similarity whatsoever to Tom Robinson’s ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’ and absolutely none to Kraftwerk’s self harm-inducing ‘Autobahn’.
What it offers is three and a half sparkling minutes of something which hangs between electro and pop/1980 groove and 2020 club, and which is classified by a genre I’d never heard of before – Scandinavian Balearic. That would be what they play on the beach at Malmö then?
And for the technical it is replete with arpeggiation from start to finish. Perhaps it should be called Arpeggiostrade.
You might know I like to reconcile tracks to films, asking ‘which movie could this be a soundtrack to?’ No problems with ‘Autostrada’. It has to be Beverley Hills Cop.
The only disappointment for me is that it didn’t finish with the big ending I was expecting. Rather than the Lamborghini reaching V2 just outside Parma it stops like the driver just saw the polizia parked up on the hard shoulder with a speed camera. But you can’t have everything.
They’ve said before, “We want to make music that can act as a remedy to the slight despair we all feel, living through the 2020s.” Slight? Boy, that’s stoicism for you. Perhaps they could arrange to have this bottled up and injected instead of a vaccine.
‘Autostrada’ is out on October 16th.