Described as ‘The Travelling Wilburys of Icelandic electronic music’, Evil Madness is the collective banner for no fewer than half a dozen luminaries of the Icelandic electro scene. No, I haven't heard of any of them (ok, that’s not strictly true: the name BJ Nilsen rings a bell, but I’ve not heard any of his work), and nor have I heard any of their three previous albums. On the strength of ‘Super Great Love’ – a title no British or American band could have got away with – I’m not entirely sure if I need to investigate their back catalogue.
The nine tracks on ‘Super Big Love’are all built upon the blueprint of Kraftwerkian electro-disco, that feature prominent pulsating grooves and squelchy analogue synth sounds that bump and grind with real warmth.
There’s also a very 80s feel to ‘Super Big Love’, and it's fair to say that it’s an album that's all about the synthesized bass groove. There’s something quite satisfying, comforting even, in the metronomy of drum machines that sound like drum machines, the schooshing snare sounds that sound nothing like actual snare drums that slice through the rapid oscillating sounds that form the basslines and the clean, smooth synths that have sharp, pointed edges and defined lines. But what begins promisingly enough soon wears thin as a premise for an album: there simply isn’t enough variety here, and while (Cafe Eindhoven’ strays into some approximation of bad 90s house, only without the beats, it’s largely much of a muchness in terms of tone and tempo. Without vocals to provide another level, it soon gets rather dull.
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‘Bru! Ubillinn’ sounds like a computer game and bounces around for five and half minutes without really going anywhere. The same is largely true of the rest of the tracks, simple motifs repeated endlessly over a monotonous beat and simple, 3-note bassline with dropouts and breakdowns following the most predictable of patterns. ‘Maxim’s Goldfinger’ is a particularly bad offender. In the spirit of the once-popular 12” extended remix (all filler, not so much killer), and with a running time in excess of 11 minutes, there’s a very real danger of being driven mad by it, or otherwise falling comatose through boredom, and ultimately, the end of the album came as something of a relief.
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