Cosey Mueller Softcore

Released
3rd October 2024
Label 
Static Age Musik
Format

12 Inch

Black

£18.00

‘Eine Stadt voller trotz, Eine Stadt voller Tod, Was ist hier korrekt, Das weiß niemand konkret, Neue Hässlichkeit, Neue Freiheit, Neue Sklaverei, In der Nacht Geschrei’ (Trotzstadt) ‘A city full of defiance, A city full of death, What is correct here, Nobody knows for sure, New Ugliness, New Freedom, New Slavery, Screaming in the Night’ (City Of Defiance)

Turn up the volume, clear the sofa, and prepare to move.  Cosey Mueller is back on the turntable, with the follow-up to last year’s Irrational Habits.  And, if anything, the atmosphere of uneasy angst is even more amplified, the promise of the illicit even more pronounced.

The pulsating synths and thumping dance beats combine with tip of the nose quivering intensity.  Haunting melodies lock-in with an utterly possessive synchronicity, reinforced by occasional swells of clean guitar.  Meanwhile, austerely deadpan vocals, alternating as ever between German and English, continue to hone the art of mechanical yet mesmerising repetition as we become entangled in a web of the ambiguous and the unspoken.

Möchtegern (Would Like To) kicks things off perfectly, all pulsing electronics, skittering melodies, and whispered urgings.  Then, the darkly contagious I Am Soft and Trotzstadt weave their insidious spells, before the side closes with the fevered Fremdtraüme (Foreign Dreams).  The potency of the flip side is equally entrancing.  The detached acceptance of the choppy Falsches Ding (Wrong Thing) and the throbbing Imitierte Lust (Imitated Lust) feed into the deeply resonant grooves of the banging In Indifference, before Sugarhoney languidly brings us back to reality.

—Foundation Vinyl