Trentemøller
The Last Resort (2 CD)

"A pretentious and fake album that stages a theater of horror.." and again "An overly sentimental karaoke of '90s clichés glued to some of those youthful electro sounds..".
Rating 0 - Christian Zingales - Blow Up, Rock and other contaminations - no. 101 - Oct. 2006

I confess that after having learned such seemingly unappealable, caustic lines (re)viewed (which I respect in their entirety, for the sake of clarity) from the esteemed C.Z., an "authority" in his field of critical affiliation, I felt, conversely, an urgent need to grant not too fleeting a listen to such (as it would seem) musically eschatological and totally detestable debut work of the emerging Copenhagen DJ (Anders) Trentemøller (I adore this ø middle-European).

In the first instance, I believe it is helpful to note the structural nature of this debut work over (truly) long distances of the unkempt Anders, consisting, in its most congruent and materially enticing version (the one under examination), of two entire CDs: the first of the two, the true "Last Resort"-work (curious that a debut album was titled that way), consists of thirteen substantial [also in the average duration of each movement] tracks for a chronological total of seventy-seven minutes and some seconds.

The (Compay) Segundo of the two works contains (quite generously), among various songs and assorted remixes, an additional eleven tracks for a musical-temporality reaching around seventy-six minutes: given that cold arithmetic, despite scholastic appearances, is anything but an inexact and/or misinterpretable science, we face a corpulent musical colossus composite from indeed (Hur) twenty-five (?) {this is a fake number: posted to test your level of attention/endurance} tracks and an overall substantial duration: it happily exceeds two and a half hours, more or less.

Now: is it ever plausible that one of the most requested producers in the pseudo-alternative dance scene of the moment * with one hundred and fifty-three minutes plus thirty-five seconds of moderately assumed assorted proto-modern music (this being minimal, hypnotic, deep, repetitive, semi-integrally instrumental and episodically fragmented deep-dub-electro-house-techno) doesn’t provide anything worthwhile to save or refer to the fallible memory of future generations as at least an appreciable trace/testimony of a current, fleeting pseudo-contemporary music fragment?

To be perfectly frank, and even if the source isn’t among the most authoritative [the uncertain/shaky perspective], I would argue the perceived personal unfoundedness of such heavily critical anamnesis: the succinct, digital-delicacy intrinsic to the crepuscular fragment named "Moan", both in the instrumental-only version and especially in the pleasantly vocalized one by Mademoiselle Ane Trolle, leaves more than pleasantly surprised; likewise, the initial "Take Me Into Your Skin" (apart from the beautiful title that distinguishes it) becomes appreciable by virtue of an enveloping, growing, spiral-shaped, and concentric though elementary electro-magma: nothing of progressive significance, to be clear, but far from lowly disagreeable; also worth mentioning, in the authentic sea-enlargement brought upon our digital perception, the Underworld-like and athletic hammer named "Into The Trees (Serenetti Part 3)" and the shadowy pleasure contained in the padded "Miss You" as in "Always Something Better" especially concerning the (of the three proposed in the lineup) 'Vocal Version’ featuring Mr. Richard Davis. There are, it’s pointless to deny, within such a substantial musical mass, several fragments not exactly (con)vincing if not concretely negligible: the scholastic doubts imprinted in "Nightwalker" or the routine dance-floor atmosphere intrinsic to "Killer Kat", "Prana" and the bland "Vamp", but this doesn’t so heavily affect the sporadically appreciable results of the ample work packaged by the young Dane.

Of course, to remain in semi-adjacent expressive domains, Tiefschwartz or even Silicone Soul have recently produced work of decidedly finer finish and sound-consistency, but a fleeting taste of "our" Trentemøller, especially if you habitually handle sound delicacies (given the significant bulk we might speak of a pie) of such techno-structure, can be peacefully granted.

* co-producer with Angelo Badalamenti of the music for the last David Lynch film (Inland Empire)