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Having served the Beta Band and bizarre hip-hop tainted outfit King Biscuit Time, Steve Mason returns with his new, tellingly-titled project Black Affair. Pleasure Pressure Point is certainly dark and illicit: clattering handclaps and sultry, narcotic vocals elbow with bleeps and spatterings of pure synth-pop on a record that grows in depth and intensity with every listen. Collaborating with Detroit based Warp artist Jimmy Edgar, Mason scoops generous helpings of Detroit techno influences and the ‘warp’ of his friends label name. Broody and theatrical, this is an album padded heavily at the shoulders with eighties sounds.
However, in terms of 2008 rather than 1988, this is the sound of Hot Chip and Neon Neon bound and gagged into the recesses of a more society and ear-friendly Patrick Bateman’s mind. Opening with the breathy title track, mouth clicks and blips are underpinned by the soundtrack to a sadistic, grown-up version of erotic LazerQuest; setting the bleak yet brilliant tone of the album.
Standout single ‘Tak! Attack’ firmly leans its star-shaped, dazzling form against the Human League’s legacy: its Blue Monday catchiness elevates the album from gauche, self-conscious Gothic stylings and onto dancefloors. Similarly, ‘Will She Come’ breaks up the industrial fog with melodic, melancholic detachment, while the only let-down is the somewhat flimsy ‘Subfuge.’
A wry, beat-noir sensuousness pervades: the album remains thoroughly on the side of petit-mort rather than death-mask on the morbid spectrum the peppering of S&M creates. ‘It’s Real’, therefore, conjures up images of the SMASH Martians rather than sweaty, aging geezers in ropey patent leather, painting a shimmering scene of pop-electro melodrama. This is just one instance that pinpoints what’s great about this record: the camp, eighties sexual decadence is more a beguiling presence than a crass neon Soho signpost; the kinkiness is more a courteous sideline than a loud-mouth slut threatening a severe whipping.
'Pleasure Pressure Point' is cohesive yet intriguingly coloured with conflict. It is deeply obsessive yet thumb-twiddlingly tentative; aching yet sparse. There’s a purposeful, strident persistence, yet Mason’s precision harnessing of industrial minimalism succinctly captures the conundrum of offering absolutely zero clue as to the nature of this purpose. So, although we have no idea what, exactly, 'Pleasure Pressure Point' is, you come away feeling that this record certainly hits it.
