Lindstrom’s debut full length-statement (2007
s It’s A Feedelity Affair was a singles compilation) is a towering epic that warrants the dusting down of hackneyed phrases like ‘musical journey’ and ‘trance’. Since the realms of professionalism and physical impossibility dictate that I can’t just come round your house, pull you off your feet and scream hysterically “YES YES YES- LISTEN TO THIS”, I guess I will have to resort to the traditional journalistic practice of using words even if sometimes, the former just seems so much more appropriate. So, let’s start by saying that I seriously cannot remember the last time that I heard an album that was created entirely for the purposes of giving pleasure: pure naïve unadulterated sensation. The cover photo has our hero shilling with a kind of bashful ebullience which is perfect really, as this is entirely un-egotistical music a feat made even more remarkable considering that he has remixed everyone from LCD Soundsystem and Radiohead to Roxy Music.
Where You Go I Go Too runs to 55 minutes and is composed of three tracks with only the second (‘Grand Ideas’) faltering slightly (ie, it has the discourtesy to be merely great as opposed to stratospherically awe-inspiring. Lindstrom has been described previously as space disco. This is fine but it doesn’t go far enough: this is an intergalactic travelogue directed by Michael Mann and a Milky Way composed of sequencers; it is mirror balls on Saturn and Vangelis as in-house DJ at Studio 54 now.
The eponymous title track opens the floodgates, rushing for a mighty 28 minutes. Building off ambient drones and spacious flickers of melody, things begin to build and just get bigger and bigger. Smeary synth stabs start to appear, blearily tugging you every direction and every single second sparkles with fizzy radiance. It’s at the 23 minute mark when things goes truly interstellar. With just the slightest chord change, the tune leaps into what seems like an infinite coda, a million melodic strands coming together and basically yanking the listener into another galaxy for five minutes of unbridled bliss. At this point you realise this is the greatest album ever made. Obviously it isn’t but you get my point.
Great albums to have to deliver that moment though. And Lindstrom, just to make sure we’re happy, throws in a second one for good measure. ‘Long Way Home’, the final piece, has been running for seven minutes or so underpinned by the sound of cybernetic crickets hiding in empty milk bottles and topped off by an unresolved star-drenched summer melody. A gaseous whoosh brings a song-shift and we’re instantly locked into a farewell electro-soul melody that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Loose Ends record. Our crickets begin to run in parallel with something resembling the flight of the digital bumblebee. Eventually, everything begins to fade slowly and perfectly away, the impression being that everything will simply run forever.
This shiny diamond of a debut will drag you somewhere blissfully beautiful for an hour of your life outside of this cold unforgiving world. Sometimes it’s cheesy, sometimes it’s almost easy listening and a lot of the time it’s retro in parallel- a history of disco and dance that never really happened in the first place. Buy this and gurn with your heart.
