One of the smaller but more passionately enduring subcultures in the world today is that around slow dance music. The core of its audience is a Gen X crowd, a good number of whom have stuck with club culture since the mid 90s or earlier, with others who’ve rekindled their love of electronic music in middle age: people whose knees might not be up to stomping to techno for hours, but are still deeply committed to the experience of deep and prolonged emersion in repetitive beats.
Belfast’s Phil Kieran is a key mover and shaker in this scene. Though his career began 25 years ago as a producer and DJ of high energy techno and breakbeat, as a friend and ally of the late Andrew Weatherall, he was a part of the convergent evolution towards the more steady-stepping sound. In the early 2010s, his Le Carousel alias in particular was a vehicle for him to boldly move away from expectations of high octane club bangers and lean heavily into more melancholy indie, shoegaze and electropop elements into. This second Le Carousel album has been nine years in the making, but in keeping with the sense of patient groove in this music, it feels like an entirely natural continuation.
The elements here are familiar: vintage drum machines ticking along with simple patterns, clean synth chords and arpeggios that evoke Giorgio Moroder and early Human League, moody atmospherics of shoegazers like Ride and Slowdive, strong echoes of The Cure, strings that remind us of Kieran’s recent parallel career as film composer. But they’re so completely blended that once you’re immersed, they aren’t evocative of the past, but just tools within his palette.
The melancholy is more overt than ever here – and track titles like “We're All Gonna Hurt,” “Rough Ending,” “You're Killing Me Inside” tell you exactly how melancholy – but appropriately for music connected to an audience growing old but still holding on to what they love, the sense is of being bruised but unbowed. This whole record feels shot through with solidarity, with a message that pain is shared, but so is beauty – and with a deep implied sense of community around that feeling. It’s subtle at first: this kind of music really doesn’t shout. But it works its magic through repetition, and with every repeat play it gets more potent, heartbreaking and lovely.
Listen to "We're All Gonna Hurt":
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