- Sweden's Minilogue are doing their damndest to make the horrible excesses of prog sound good. Each release seems to get longer, flatter, and more indulgent, yet people seem to like them. They've dabbled in Cologne pep and bounce (‘The Girl from Botany Bay'), patient Chilean squirm ('Elephant's Parade') and even grey Maurizio shudder ('Birdsong'), each foray retaining their love of grand, spacious vistas, filled with small emotional peaks and troughs, but more concerned with endless forward motion - a kind of progressive minimal.
These two long pieces carry the indulgence to new heights - and lengths, with the title track just shy of thirteen minutes. Like a dense and misty version of Sahko's 'Twin Bleeps', 'Inca' works snaking highs and low tones around motorik drums and spooky haunted-house synths, building an enormous crescendo of ramping rockets in a break that, being Minilogue, leads deliberately nowhere. 'Urubumba' is immediate by comparison, tackling Akufen with stuttering micro-samples and a zig-zagging bassline, equally complex but much funkier. Their almost anally-retentive attention to detail and penchant for unfulfilled gratification may frustrate on the floor - playing them end-to-end would be a mistake - but few producers are as skilled at manipulating dance music conventions for their own ends. Two further weird and wonderful additions to the excellent Minilogue catalogue.
TracklistA Inca
B Urubamba