When Antony Hegarty managed to transform Oneohtrix Point Never’s arpeggiated drone dirge Returnal into a soulful piano dirge a few months ago, it was the first time we realized here just how much pop was lurking behind Wire darling Daniel Lopatin’s music. That We Can Play is a more explicit excursion down that delicious route, in collaboration with skewed pop merchant and childhood friend Joel Ford of Tigercity.
Games do a marvelous job of repossessing and reinvigorating horribly dated MIDI timbres and proceed to dress these intense, claustrophobic tunes in the authentic threads of 80s synth pop. Lopatin described Games as “hardwired plumbing in the house of pop. It’s not pop itself, its sort of like the behind-the-scenes arteries and capillaries of pop music” – you can see what he means.
Lead-off track Strawberry Skies, which features cooing vocals from Brooklyn based label-mate Laurel Halo, is the highlight here, and its weird how something so icily digital can be so immediately evocative of an analog childhood of cassettes albums, VCRs with tracking problems and 8 bit games consoles.
Words: Ian Lamont
