Album of the Week: Ellen Allien, ‘Dust’

Album of the Week: Ellen Allien, ‘Dust’

21 May, 2010 | 5.11AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: album of the week, bpitch control, ellen allien

20 years after the fall of the Wall, Berlin continues to evolve at a rapid pace, so it’s only fitting that Ellen Allien—the ‘Berlinette’ and ‘Stadtkind’ whose music is so intertwined with her home town—should keep shapeshifting as well.

Her new album, ‘Dust’, is unmistakably an Ellen Allien record, awash in her customary lush textures and jewel tones. After the dry, brittle restraint of ‘Sool’, ‘Dust’ marks a return to the overt emotionalism of albums like ‘Thrills’ and ‘Orchestra of Bubbles’, Allien’s 2006 collaboration with Apparat.

‘Our Utopie’

Allien has long worked with co-producers—Holger Zilske on ‘Berlinette’ and ‘Thrills’, Antye Greie (aka AGF) on ‘Sool’—and ‘Dust’ finds her continuing to reach out beyond the Bpitch inner circle. Her first collaboration with Tobias Freund—a Berlin producer known for his minimalist house and techno as Tobias., as well as even more experimental excursions in the duo NSI.—’Dust’ bears her co-producer’s fingerprints, but not as often as you’d think. The undulating sequences of ‘Dream’ sound like something that might have come out of Freund’s studio, but that’s the only obvious sign of his influence.

‘Dream’

Tracks like ‘Our Utopie’, ‘Flashy Flashy’, and ‘My Tree’ find Allien up to her old tricks, fusing a melancholic melodic impulse with streamlined techno grooves; that approach also describes ‘Ever’, one of the record’s most compelling club offerings. But she doesn’t stop there: the throbbing ‘Schlumi’ has an almost funk or disco feel—it reminds me a little of !!! or DFA—while ‘My Tree’ wrings a gorgeous clarinet melody out of dry drums and piano pings.

‘Ever’

‘Schlumi’

The most unexpected tracks, though, are surely ‘You’ and ‘Sun the Rain’, both essentially indie-pop songs. ‘You’ sounds like Allien’s tribute to the Pixies, complete with stubby electric bass and gently distorted guitars. (I’m not entirely sold on the song, but the bridge always manages to bring a smile to my face.)

‘You’

Guitars also drive ‘Sun the Rain’, which invariably reminds me of New Order’s ‘Love Vigilantes’ (though the keening pedal steel even takes it towards Yo La Tengo country, hard as that may be to believe). And then there’s the AutoTune issue—a bold, possibly divisive move, but for once, the pitch-correction technique actually manages to enhance the song’s emotional impact. For my money, ‘Sun the Rain’ is simply a near-perfect pop song, smartly arranged around yearning chord changes that tie your heart up in knots.

‘Sun the Rain’

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