Although signed to one of the city's most venerable and (happy 20th birthday!) long-standing labels, Glasgow-based producer and musician Julian Corrie still feels like an odd fit for Chemikal Underground.
The story goes that Nottingham-born Corrie, then working as a freelance sound engineer for BBC Scotland, was signed by label head Stewart Henderson after he saw him playing a gig in his adopted hometown. It's what's known as taking a flyer. Then again, perhaps there's enough in Corrie's own description of his sound - "spacey hypercolour indie dance pop" - to imply some common ground.
But if a flyer is what it was, it worked out fine. Light Of The North, Corrie's 2012 debut as Miaoux Miaoux, was well-made and appropriately well-received, a synth-pop confection that revealed both its creator's love of dance music and his compositional nous. There was a certain bravery on show too: Stop The Clocks, probably that album's strongest track, feels unflinchingly intimate, even when its crunching synth lines start to bite, and its title is at the very least a nod to WH Auden's famous poem. Corrie has since remixed tracks for Chvrches, Belle And Sebastian and, from further afield, Norwegian dance producer Lindstrom and coral-haired Californian iconoclast Ariel Pink.
Barring the addition of some live instrumentation, School Of Velocity marks no major change of direction. The standout track is It's The Quick, built around arpeggiated keyboard lines, an insistent kick drum, sawtooth bass and what I'm guessing is a pitch-shifted vocal sample (liner notes are a rare luxury in these days of downloads and MP3s). It sounds almost like an homage to The 2 Bears's Bear Hug, but that aside it's a punchy, euphoric, hands-in-the-San-Antonio-air party banger with more drops than Alton Towers. You probably won't come across a better floor-filler all summer.
Opener Launch Loop takes the "hypercolour" bit of that earlier self-description and sends it off the spectrum, but following it are A Flutter Echo, Star Sickness and the title track, three songs with an impressive degree of emotional candour. Unbeatable Slow Machine ventures into darker sonic territory but the shimmer is back for closer Mostly Love Now, with its day-glo riffs and dreamy vocals.
When Corrie slows things down, he builds his more contemplative songs around intros that often sound like the beginning of 1980s Michael Mann films, probably the ones scored by Tangerine Dream. There are flavours of other artists from the same period too, however, particularly on Luxury Discovery which brings to mind two acts who both favoured subtle, well-crafted pop: Scritti Politti and Prefab Sprout. Like them, Corrie isn't scared to emote or employ complex melodies that don't take the obvious route. Nor does he hide behind his kit, a battery of toys that includes his treasured Roland Juno 106 analogue synth.
Best of all, though, he brings a degree of verbal dexterity to a genre that's generally pretty low on lyrical artistry. "I'll be honest, I'm a decent fake," he sings over bright synth stabs on A Flutter Echo. He isn't, though. On this showing he sounds very much like the real thing.
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