Someone has apparently forgotten to tell House of Blondes that we are in the year 2012. This group of New Yorkers has apparently missed the passage of time and continues to reside in 1981. Lost in a sea of early OMD and New Order records the band sound as if they've not bought a single piece of equipment in thirty years and sincerely enjoy creating atmospheric washes of synthetic color over each and every song they write.
Their album Clean Cuts is a masterwork in pop minimalism that sounds like the best team up between Brian Eno and OMD that never happened. With lush analog-sounding synths washing over minimalistic beats and detached vocals the whole thing sounds like it was recorded in an underground tunnel and feels about as cold as that too. That, my friends, is what makes this record so cool...it's detached and cool demeanor that seems like it's looking off in another direction.
Cooly wandering the post-apocalyptic soundscape as if it just didn't care, House of Blondes proudly resides in its own introspective world. The lush imaginative songs truly belong in a post industrial environment of their own and if you can manage to get to that location you're rewarded with a form of post-modernism that's sleek, clean, and very cool. Clean Cuts is a work of retro futurism that pays tribute to its influences in fine style and had it been released thirty years ago it would have been declared a work of genius. It's that good, that abstract, and that essential.
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