Superluv: Por Lo Que Tiene de RománticoRemate
Recordings From The Other Side, Spain
Rating: 48
by Andrew Casillas
This will likely go down as one of the shorter reviews in Club Fonograma history, but there’s not really much you can discuss when talking about wallpaper. Now, that’s not a 100% slam on Remate, whose music doesn’t exactly offend the senses. But Superluv, their latest record, comes across as some lo-fi survey of modern indie, without ever giving you the sense of what Remate sounds like.
There are certainly a handful of nice little songs here—“Laurie Allen,” “Gigante,” closer “Estampidas de Caballos”—but the album as a whole plays like the rural cousin of about 1,000 other bands. Fits of chillwave gloss, twee-pop voice cracks, jangly rhythm guitars, faux-European balladry, that hard-to-articulate thing that Triángulo de Amor Bizarro does where they play really loud and abrasively and your blood rushes into your cranium super fast, and other indie signifiers abound across 14 short tracks. It’s important to distinguish that nothing Remate does is really wrong, but there’s little to show that this is more than you could get from a random search on the Hype Machine.
One of our lovely commenters on the site once asked why we review less-than-stellar records. There are plenty of reasons why when the artist is of some renown, but what about in the case of a little-known artist like Remate? Even though this may sound mean, it’s because there are plenty of other little-known artists in the Club Fonograma realm who you should pay great attention to and we love to keep plugging, but when someone makes something that seemingly fits into the fold and doesn’t show its hand in any way, the least we could do is educate and inform. Now let’s go wash out our mouths with that Sonic Youth EP…
There are certainly a handful of nice little songs here—“Laurie Allen,” “Gigante,” closer “Estampidas de Caballos”—but the album as a whole plays like the rural cousin of about 1,000 other bands. Fits of chillwave gloss, twee-pop voice cracks, jangly rhythm guitars, faux-European balladry, that hard-to-articulate thing that Triángulo de Amor Bizarro does where they play really loud and abrasively and your blood rushes into your cranium super fast, and other indie signifiers abound across 14 short tracks. It’s important to distinguish that nothing Remate does is really wrong, but there’s little to show that this is more than you could get from a random search on the Hype Machine.
One of our lovely commenters on the site once asked why we review less-than-stellar records. There are plenty of reasons why when the artist is of some renown, but what about in the case of a little-known artist like Remate? Even though this may sound mean, it’s because there are plenty of other little-known artists in the Club Fonograma realm who you should pay great attention to and we love to keep plugging, but when someone makes something that seemingly fits into the fold and doesn’t show its hand in any way, the least we could do is educate and inform. Now let’s go wash out our mouths with that Sonic Youth EP…