Album review – Modern Architecture by Swimming Pools & Movie Stars (2022) (Jigsaw Records)
Swimming Pools and Movie Stars is the project of California’s, Laurence Macaspac, who shows himself to be one of the finest modern proponents of all that is fuzz and distortion about much of the jangle-pop genre’s modern scene, whilst still being shrouded in a core that is all things late 80s anglophile.
Initially, the most driven and incessant of his Moden Architecture debut, can be heard in One, I Dig You and Stars. All swirling reverb and distortion, with a plethora of melodic riffs just about enabled to bubble their way to the surface, these tracks are the perfect mix of todays Cowboy Dinosaur / Vern Matz fuzz laden freneticism and the dank, darkness of Psychocandy era The Jesus and Mary Chain.
The album becomes incremetally less dank though and as it does, peels away different walls of sound to reveal other nuances of inner beauty. Someone Like You and I Dig You is everything New Order used to be at the start of their tenure, before they started cavorting with footballers and electro-pop. All electro-fuzz, brimful with faux jangled riffs, this is a sound that has tended to be ignored in the various ‘revivals’ that emerge every few years.
Perhaps the best of the album is the most candescent. Here Saturday, Stay and Live Away reduce the fuzz, distortion to something of a subsidary whimper, as the slight, beautiful, gaze laden jangled melodies that are so reminiscent of the recent Happypills sound, offer a caressing ying to the rest of the albums more driven yang.
As a debut album, this is as strong and as accomplished as it is possible to imagine and signals the absolute necessity of ensuring that every possible button is pressed to follow this band !
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