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Pitchforkmedia worte:
Clor
Clor
[Regal; 2005]
Rating: 8.2
Comparisons can be deal-breakers but what the hell: Clor vocalist Barry Dobbins sounds a little like the Arcade Fire's Win Butler. Well, he does when adding a pained crescendo to the word "more" on a song called "Good Stuff", from his band's eponymous debut. Other tracks find him tricking out Gary Numan or Robyn Hitchcock c. Soft Boys atop shit-is-bananas synth garb or filching inspirational one-liners ("Each of us is special in our own unique way") from milquetoast countrymen Embrace.
Clor play buzzy, hopped-up indie pop that sounds great with your first caffeine of the day. They're pop in perhaps the most literal sense of the word-- their songs POP out at you, glowing bright blue-green like a Nike tracksuit. Dudes can play, too, and with music this dense (Clor tracks are a frottage of guitar, bass, live drums, drum machine, vocals, and upwards of 14 vintage synthesizers likely purchased on eBay), precision is ne plus ultra. Bios list only five members, which suggests multi-tracking, but that's allowed. These boys nail their notes, and unlike most indie poppers, they can thump. Piloted by chichi sequencers and a house-inflected rhythm, "Dangerzone" sounds great coming through walls or from under blankets or with a paper bag over your head.
In indie rock, a rigidly self-contained genre whose bands employ strikingly similar sounds and production techniques, the difference between mediocrity and greatness is often, literally, one or two notes. Clor delight in making unexpected stylistic choices. They excel at turning left where most would turn right or not turn at all, and their shiftiness rarely seems forced. Take single "Love + Pain". For its first 47 seconds, "Love + Pain" teeters on obnoxiousness. Notes bop and bubble in a jittery morass, while Dobbin's nasally vocals claw at nearby skin. It's not bad, just a little nauseating. But then the chorus hits. I'm sorry-- first the prechorus, i.e., the four bars that make all the difference. Instead of launching into the refrain, with its one-line hook and beeline chord changes, Clor prime the canvas with a palate-cleansing arpeggiated riff. Perfect.
Like a stand-up comic who overuses shock value, a band can be unpredictable in very predictable ways. Many Clor-type bands use a glitzy, structurally overloaded approach in order to curry favor with bored listeners. But Clor are master blenders, cobbling together tasty unrelated nuggets and making them seem like sonic soul mates. Opener "Good Stuff" superimposes a Hives-y quarter-note riff over an ambiguous instrumental backdrop, in which grainy drum machine and chorus-drenched bass invoke post-wavers Poster Children. "Hearts of Fire" rubberizes a benumbed Kraftwerk-style motor groove with guitar and vox, both pliant and catchy, before drifting off in an extended instrumental passage featuring more computers than the Very Large Array. They even get mushy on the immaculate "Gifted".
So it's a bummer the album fizzles a bit toward the end. Clor are so flashy and blemish-free, they're almost celluloid. They work plasticity to their favor mostly-- and damn that's hard-- but "Magic Touch", which is wanky, and "Making You All Mine", which is unmemorable, leave a divot in this otherwise excellent album. If Clor were a film, they'd be a shimmering (but hardly weightless), FX-laden blockbuster, and those always drag. But as the shimmering (and often weightless), FX-laden albums of its ilk go, you could do much worse.
-Sam Ubl, August 1, 2005
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eter, aka 
usty 
halk
