When one thinks about eletronic music produced in Germany, images of cold, machanical and repetitive techno usually come to mind. Well, for Tensnake (aka as Marco Niermerski) music couldn't be more organic. Having consistently produced brilliant nu-disco and house singles since 2006 - his Coma Cat hit is still quite able to stirr any dancefloor - the german DJ and producer has finaly decided to serve a full album: Glow.
Avoiding to rescue past tunes just for the sake of it, Glow is an "all over the place" album, trying to touch diverse genres that never tread too far from the ones on which Tensnake built his entire career. The synths and the disco vibes are obvisously present along the 16 new songs, but there are light hints of r&b, indie pop, downtempo and even progressive house. Glow is also a heavily colaborative album, where Nile Rodgers, Jacques Lu Cont, Jamie Lidell, Jeremy Glenn and mostly Fiora Cutler (a Berlin based singer whose debut seems to have been on a Robot Koch single) lend their vocals or musical expertise to create a cohesive homage to the 70s and 80s.
After the intro track, First Stong, the album builds on the retro vibes of Love Sublime, a song where Nile Rodgers adds guitar chords and Fiora lightly sings about the inevitable chemistry of love. Pressure is quite unremarkable, even though it has somewhat of an hi-nrg feeling and the collaboration with Jacques Lu Cont and Jamie Lidell is as retro as it can get on Feel of Love. Sure, Stuart Price's frenetic production is nowhere to be seen on the mentioned track, unless one recalls his neonized moniker Zoot Woman, where he rambles on more retro landscapes.
The expansive No Colour and the synthetic Things Left to Say are some of the few instrumental tracks, but Fiora soon resurfaces on Kill the Time, singing as seductively as ever, over a downtempo matrix that soon transforms into a pop song. Jeremy Glenn surely grabs the atention in one of the most brilliant moments of the album, Selfish. Unbashably forged as a retro-house anthem, the song will rise your temperature as soon as it starts to play. Keeping the high production values, Good Enough to Keep is another Fiora and Rodgers driven masterpiece, interlacing pop, balearic and house into a brilliant and seductive musical gem.
While Holla is an experimental piece - or a filler, depends on how you see it -, previously released songs like See Right Through, No Relief and the sexy 58 BPM (all sung by Fiora) are pushed back to the second half of the album, as if Niemerski wanted to give us some excinting new stuff in the album's beginning and reassure us at the end of it that, albeit his sonic explorations, we can still trust him. Last Song closes the loop, an evocative and atmospherical track that floats as a spectre into unconsciousness.
It's a good debut album for Tensnake, but I reckon the expectations and the hype were quite high, so it's impossible not to feel a bit disappointed with the final result, as many tracks seem to be... well, merely good (considering his background and the virtues of the collaborators). Tensnake chose quantity over quality, perhaps, cutitng back on the songs lenght and creating an album that has many good tracks but few highlights. Glow is satisfactory, but chances are you won't recall it in a few months.
RATE: 7/10
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