HTRK / WORK (work work)

HTRK
WORK (work work)
(Blastfirstpetite)
* * * *

HTRK's debut album 'Marry Me Tonight' sounded like a disturbing and compelling journey to the tip of a tranquilliser dart, employing nocturnal, echoed disco with ambient distortion, while frequently sliding towards the field marked nihilism.

Unfortunately the reality for the band has since been equally bleak; HTRK tragically lost their founding member and bassist Sean Stewart to suicide in March ‘10, an event which has inevitably informed their second record.

If anything more nocturnal and cooly electronic than the debut, 'WORK (work work)' starts off like a dream sequence straight out of a giallo horror movie; 'Ice Eyes Eis' features some foreign female dialogue whispered over a slow motion trip hop beat, after which singer Jonnine Standish steps in to deliver a mournful, entirely urban vocal on 'Slo Glo' - a track which recalls the Massive Attack classic 'Protection'.

If this all sounds cosily bleak, that's because it is: the album couldn't have been better timed to coincide with pre-October melancholy. Yet tracks like 'Bending' also mark it up as a hypnotically sexy record, speaking as it does of "twisting to you" while the beats create a luminous-blue twilight around Standish's submissive vocal.

Elsewhere the record takes a dip into acidic distortion on 'Poison', and Cure-like echoed guitars on 'Love Triangle' - but the essential premise, of an album reveling in a dystopian morphine trip, remains pleasingly consistent.