As supportive as Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's fans have been of his random acts of creative fitfulness, one wouldn't blame them for feeling a bit tested by his most recent string of output. Between his brilliant but impractical 2008 long-player Where You Go I Go Too and his 42-minute refit of "Little Drummer Boy", two of the Norwegian producer's recent major releases have accounted for nearly 100 minutes of music across a scant four tracks. In a scene where an elongated 12-minute remix is par for the course, that's still hard going.
Real Life Is No Cool isn't just the achingly stylish and neatly accessible dance record to end all that, it also constitutes a fresh new take on the strand of retro-futurism that Lindstrøm helped create. The main difference is that whereas a lot of his output has been rooted in a genre-- disco, Balearic, new age-- Real Life Is No Cool often feels more like an attack on the very idea. It's almost as if Lindstrøm's response to years of genre exercise has been to atomise all of his influences into mist. What remains is a free-floating collection of sounds that not only still works as pastiche, but also somehow provides the basis for a remarkable dance record.
Continued at Pitchfork
