[Spectral Sound] (buy mp3s)

Sometimes you read about collaborations happening in the music industry and they’re almost impossible for your little ears to comprehend. What would really happen if two heavyweights like Prince and David Bowie collided in the studio? What if Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston finally had a musical purging of all their love and talent in a duet? Seeing Seth Troxler and Matthew Dear on the same ticket didn’t quite dredge up the mind boggling fascination of a Prince/Bowie merger or the morbid fascination of a Brown/Houston team up, but I admit there was a fair amount of due anticipation to hear their result.

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It’s hard to know who exactly is tweaking what and sequencing and so forth, but it seems the vocal duties for “Hurt,” the duo’s single sided output on Spectral, are taken care of by Troxler. Upon further inspection it sounds like the blunted bass and percussion work is straight out of Mathew Dear’s play book while the much warmer, Rhodesy chords developing later could be attributed to Mr. Troxler. His pitched down vocals bear a heavy reverb and chorus effect on them, filling out over the breadth of the track as they wax lyrical about pain and love in a typically irreverent manner that even manages to name check Huey Lewis. Punctuated intermittently by big floor toms and crisp, squashed down claps, much of the effectiveness lies in the sculpting of the sounds used. The two producers masterly craft “Hurt” with a powerfully druggy, opiate-hued groove, slather on some sleazy rhetoric from Seth and tighten up the top end with steely hats and claps. Huey fucking Lewis!