There’s a strange but rewarding matching of talents that takes place on Music For The Long Emergency. Much as electronic pop act Poliça and European orchestral collective Stargaze have collaborated to create a record that sounds little like their other respective recordings, so too does the content have a strange bifurcated nature that nevertheless works as a greater whole.
Music for the Long Emergency perfectly encapsulates the confusion and anxiety haemorrhaging from our society on both a personal and political level.
Music for the Long Emergency lyrically and sonically animates feelings of political rebellion and solidarity, but it also poignantly maps how geopolitical turmoil reshapes human desires for and experiences of intimacy.
This is Music For the Long Emergency, an emergency that will not be going away any time soon and should be fought with, and wrestled with, over sombre synths and disturbing undulations. When a musical response to a politically lost society feels so appropriate, it is a wonder how anyone is listening to album after album of perfect cadences at all.
Whatever looming shadow might darken your homeland, Music for the Long Emergency offers a substantive retreat, with enough room for minds to rest and wander in peace.
Even if it's not always as coherent as Poliça and s t a r g a z e's own albums, Music for the Long Emergency's experiments balance ambition and emotion in admirable ways.
For all the anxious rhetoric of its literary namesake, Emergency flourishes when it avoids aggression.
While there are some interesting elements to Music For the Long Emergency, and there are aspects of both POLIÇA and s t a r g a z e's music that work well together, the album is generally quite confused and lacking in any real excitement.
I found this album impressively experimental, and at times magical and elevating. Yet it is also experientially challenging and at times I wanted it to stop. But I guess that’s just like life – and Music For The Long Emergency is an album about life.
Though challenging and, in its best moments, quite exciting, Music for the Long Emergency ultimately resembles a first draft. Its most compelling ideas are knotted up with its worst, and the whole thing could use a thorough edit.
/ | Esquire (UK) |