(Catskills / Inertia)

Back to the future? Ahead to the past? Who knows?

Finnish duo Pepe Deluxé – Jari Salo and Tomi Paajaanen – have travelled a long way since their early days of heavily-sampled dance music. This, their third album, was four years in the making, and – surprisingly – is completely free of samples. You could forgive the casual listener for not picking up on this detail, however, since the album sounds so convincingly retro (ergo the title) that the four year gap is easily explained – they spent all that time working in the recording studio, trying to make the album sound like an artefact from the late sixties. If this is the sole criterion by which we’re supposed to judge this album, then it’s a success. However, unlike recent forays into retro authenticity – I’m thinking here of Midlake’s astonishingly good album The Trials Of Van Occupanther – there’s no focus. Spare Time Machine imitates, albeit very successfully, sounds from a large variety of scenes, styles, and periods from the late fifties through to the early eighties: the Supremes-esque doo-wop backing vocals of opener The Mischief of Cloud Six, the Jefferson Airplane-esque psychedelia of Go For Blue, the Stones-meets-Creedence dirty blues of Pussy Cat Rock, and the Lee Hazlewood-esque croon of Apple Thief all attest to the album’s variety. This is all rather impressive when you know there’s no sampling here; however, without that knowledge, you’d be forgiven for wondering why an album that sounds so much like an example of the late nineties vogue for all things retro was ever allowed to be released in 2007. An anachronism indeed.

***½

CHAD PARKHILL

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