A Different Arrangement

Minimal wave, cold wave, darkwave: a number of monikers are churning through the genre-naming machine right now to describe bands like Black Marble (which is tagged \"darkwave\"). But the terms all share common traits. Dark? Check. Cold? Check. Minimalist? Check. Earlier in 2012, this Brooklyn duo released a truly frosty EP, *Weight Against the Door*. That was a bleak and somewhat uncomfortable work. *A Different Arrangement* takes on warmer tones, both in the cozier feel of the production, the pacing, and the more organic bass lines. The atmospherics of *Arrangement* pulse with an inward-looking kind of contemplation. It\'s a pretty record, only slightly unsettling on first listen. Chris Stewart\'s buried-in-reverb vocals manage to pull you in, with his voice offering a strange kind of comfort. There are whiffs of forebears Ian Curtis and Peter Hook, to be sure, but with this collection, the duo sends out a stark, stripped-down beacon of something like hope. Yeah—it\'s dark in here sometimes, but you aren\'t alone.

A Different Arrangement surveys a wide variety of sounds, from the radiant, bouncing ebullience of “A Great Design” to the haunted playground-bop of “Limitations” (which juxtaposes sampled rim-drum clacks with layers of sentimental synth melodies and Stewart’s resonant, reverb-smeared baritone). The warm, Peter Hook-inspired basslines shapeshift across Arrangement’s runtime, and vintage synthesizer arrangements by Kube (formerly of electropop outfit Team Robespierre) are likewise versatile—airy (“MSQ No Extra”), astral (“UK”), and at times so distinctly manipulated and sculpted as to be otherworldly (“Last”). The influence of early synth pioneers like Thomas Leer and Robert Rental is felt across A Different Arrangement’s eleven tracks, as are the fingerprints of the record’s hard-line do-it-yourself architects. “All the music we gravitate towards has that quality where you can imagine the space it was created in and the people who made it. Not this handed-down-from-on-high sensibility. A certain handmade feeling is what we're after,” Stewart explains. “The music doesn't have to be complex, but it's important to carry some residue of the process, especially when working with what [can sometimes] be construed as cold-sounding electronics. It's humanizing.” If Weight Against the Door constituted a long, cold night, then A Different Arrangement heralds the moment when the radiator finally sputters to life, flooding the room with heat as the sun rises over a horizon of Brutalist tower blocks. The homemade soundtrack to a still, uncertain dawn, A Different Arrangement is a striking evolution in Black Marble’s sound.

Black Marble's debut album A Different Arrangement should make any fan of early synth pop pioneers like OMD or Soft Cell very happy.