The night club has been revisioned—the sultry, black-lit haunts with endless bass-drops and bottle service à la Michael Mann movies, has been traded out for more glitchy, nervous warehouse parties with $4 High Lifes. And probably for good reason. Times aren’t as *feel-good* as they were when Mann was cool. New York electronic artist Alex Suarez, aka Cienfuegos, invites you, now, to Club Crisis, his disquieting, beat-driven new EP due out April 10 via Bank Records. Here, you’ll get all throb and hum of your everyday discotheque, but none of its mindless agreeability, nor its ceremony and cool points. It’s feel-good, sure, for people who are comfortable with their own anxiety. Having been known to incorporate elements of pure noise and obscurity into his releases, on Club Crisis, Suarez envelopes his sonic mutations into Miami-influenced rhythms.
There’s an austerity in the low-end of meditative opener “Phaedra;” no “Happy Wanderers,” no easy listeners here, it tells. The dance floor is about to blacken, to fill with fog-machine fog, as melancholic pings ring out above all, like the longed-for beam of a lighthouse to a weatherbeaten jalopy. Suarez is at once menace and savior, a two-faced psychopath who hints that everything will be perfect, just before kicking the legs out entirely with the churning, crushing dance of seven-minute-long banger “Primavera.” Kick drum quakes your foundation as the main “snare” hit rattles like what you hear upon sticking a fork in an electrical socket. The whole thing is riddled with percussive stabs, scrawling over the darkened walls with neon-highlighter. Suarez’s effected vocals loom throughout, banshee-like, hurling sounds and wails of disdain amid spouts of the track’s Title. The pulse builds, veins distending, before the heart attack that is “Time Freak.” Static and scree loop in an abnormal propelling gut-punch, honing into a deathspell of high-frequency mania. It might be the only proper “noise” track on the album, and it feeds off the anxieties that came before it, the anxieties we have brought to it, and the anxieties yet to come on the closing Title Track. The record finishes with a breakneck rave that only relents so a disembodied voice can spew cries of agony into the whirling void. No, this is not light club music.
Also included at the end of the album is a remix from Entro Senestre, just to add to the beat-heavy ridiculousness.