AGENT SIDE GRINDER - Hardware

This album is a ride through a post-apocalyptic desert. The soundtrack to an dystopian nightmare dreamt of over thirty years ago. It engulfs you with a feeling of time and place.

Hardware manages to construct a concrete soundscape which becomes a later day monument to the eighties. On this album Agent Side Grinder hail the bizarre imagination of the lost but not forgotten imagination of that era. The era that embraced the idea of the computer and cyberspace with messianic anticipation, and bred influential cultural phenomenons which expired fast, such as the cyberpunk movement. A cultural imagination that could never decide if they were hailing an utopia or dreading a dystopia.

In this vein Hardware kicks of with an alarming oriental-sounding synth and a heavy baseline followed by a voice so British that it swears of any relations to it's mother nation of Sweden. The first song gives a promise for what follows; an album driven by a heavy and groovy bassline, loud synths and haunting vocals. Every new sound is alarming, an attack on your senses, until it gets familiarized by being integrated into the flow and rhythm of the tracks. All sounds are transparent here, nothing blends or mixes.

Hardware has a cool and mean personality, a sound which is a mixture of heavy industrial sounds - the drums and bass - and high pitched computer generated ones. Therefore Hardware is a descriptive name for this thing, it hits you in a hard mechanical manner.

It is clear where Agent Side Grinder seek their influences from. Kraftwerk's cool and distant electronica should be listed but even more so the British New Wave and art punk scene of the eighties - Depeche Mode and Joy Division are notable mentions.

The result is a distant highly self reflective album, a monument to the sound and imagination of an era which stills echos forcefully through popular culture. The album cover is an ugly but playful testament to this fact - an eighties looking hardware ad.

Though playful and self conscious, it wears thin over the course of the ride, even though there are attempts, but far too late, to broaden its horizon - notably "Target Target", the very last track. The spectrum feels to tight, the elements to few, the personality hollow.
This album is a joy ride, but I might forget a day later.

Oh yeah, this album has a post scriptum as well. What follows are fifteen remixes of the original eight tracks by various piers of theirs from the Swedish electronic scene. As it goes, some are good, some are not. [Artoffact]
- Garðar Þór

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