Real Lies - We Will Annihilate Our Enemies

I'd almost given up on ever seeing this, but Real Lies' third album, originally released in digital form back in April, finally makes its way into the physical realm. Given the delay, there's been much time to get familiar with a set of head-rush pop theses that felt laser guided to soundtrack the long hot summer that made the nights feel endless here in London this year. With the sun now seemingly starting to set on those balmy days, these songs now start to reflect a different dimension of their power, less nostalgic and euphoric as they are unabashedly romantic. It gets colder, we get closer... These are ostensibly torch songs, for friends and feelings, times and tunes, earnest and candid in a way that can often feel quite brave - it does, after all (maybe more than ever), take guts to be gentle and kind. Which is a funny thing to say about an album called We Will Annihilate Our Enemies, but read it another way: see that less as an affirmative act of aggression as it is a declaration of collective outsiderdom. Us vs Them, and the Us means the world. The words are key to understanding the appeal of a group like Real Lies, uncovering fantasy in late night loves and drugs, and the epiphanies and releases found hidden in the strange daily debasements that accompany the walk through our Modern Life. I could easily quote any number of lines from across the album, though nothing quite expresses this aspect of the RL MO then what stands at the centre of the gauzy ambi-poetry of 'LOVERWORLD' - "Love a life that seems to move, these days, eight times the speed/Which means four loving lifetimes, left, for you and me". if you're looking for fast love... and past love, and last love, it's in here. This is writing of the same lineage as Pet Shop Boys, Pulp, Arab Strap, a bedsit vista through a smartphone prism. The music, though, comes from somewhere else, an enticing amalgam of Euro dancepop nostalgia, sinewave manipulated IDM and subtle renderings of hyper-pop futurism - think, perhaps, of the Baxendale (Michael Mayer remix), Oxtongue and The Congosound 12s on the short-lived Kompakt Pop sublabel and you'll be somewhere near the right ballpark. And that's the heart of it, really, Pop song just to one side, and written from the gaze of a meaningful personal experience that somehow embodies a universal notion. In that sense, it's a utopian vision. More importantly, it's that increasingly rare thing - very human. 
 
FFO: Schneider TM, Underworld, Arab Strap, Kompakt Pop