I was entertained by an article from Shaad D’Souza, which highlighted the fresh twist a Norwegian duo of electronic music was bringing to the club music scene. Hayley Scott also did great work exploring the phenomenology of disorientation and fragmentation that this group might evoke. But when I listened to the album myself , god, I felt like, no matter how well people write about Smerz and their new album Big City Life, it will never be enough.

For starters, their fragmentary approach to songwriting, combined with powerful 4/4 rhythms and synth-modeled guitars, gave me a strong sense of nostalgia, it strongly reminded me of the unique way Gentle Giant used to write music. The polyphony is complex yet easy to follow, built with short musical phrases and harmonic structures that don’t evolve so much, keeping the tracks within a comfortable 3-to-5-minute duration. That kind of restraint was unusual for prog rock back in the day but is kind of complex for a traditional disco-club song. In fact, this writing style, paired with Catharina Stoltenberg’s sweet and flat mid-range voice, reminds me a lot of @’s are you there God? it’s me, which I previously covered here (And also compared them with Gentle Giant), and now that I think about it, they both are music duos relying a lot on synthesizers and samplers.

Returning to Smerz, the instrumentation is fascinating. Those sampled EP pianos feel lo-fi but heavily processed, which makes them sound almost like they belong in a retro video game soundtrack, both in timbre and in writing. It specifically reminds me of how Toby Fox treats piano textures in his games. The one-finger piano lines also echo how the instrument is used in both video game scores and japanese math rock songs.

Speaking of piano: Big Dreams is particularly striking. It opens with a piano theme which is constantly morphing, sliced in unpredictable subsections, written and repeated in a way that makes the meter feel elusive. Other instruments and voices make sudden, ephemeral appearances, embellishing the unsettling arrangement, only to vanish as quickly as they arrived. Finally, a drum set stabilizes everything; the room stops fumbling and shaking. But just when it seems like the track will settle into this new path, the drums disappear, and we’re right back where we started.

The entire album’s instrumentation, with over processed samples, modeled synthesis, and beat machines, feels like a solid rock band doing club music on a laptop. It’s brilliant. I strongly encourage you to listen to this album with an open heart. I’m not sure whether to call this rock or club music, but I tried getting lost in it, tried dancing to it, and damn, it’s really good for that. I encourage you to approach it in the same spirit.

For dancers, for happy-but-tribulated hearts, for emotional types and rockers alike, this one’s for you.

I strongly encourage you to check out their website, visit their Bandcamp, and support them!

Tracklist:

1. Big city life 02:08

2. But I do 03:02

3. Roll the dice 02:07

4. What 00:26

5. Feisty 02:40

6. A thousand lies 04:11

7. Close 04:29

8. You got time and I got money 04:31

9. Big dreams 03:04

10. Street style 01:34

11. Imagine this 02:27

12. Dreams 04:09

13. Easy 03:15

Author: Martín Cacho

Martín is a video game composer, producer and writer from Sonora, México.