Overmono: Good Lies album review — electronic music with human emotion

The evolution of human feelings brings an expanding repertoire of ways to show how much we care for each other. We have learnt to arrange our hands with their unique opposable thumbs into heart shapes. Like replicating chromosomes, rows of “x”s sprout at the end of our communiques. We have invented the emoji.

All this display of caringness has spilled into dance music. Once a format that privileged body over mind, it now places an onus on emotiveness. EDM, aka electronic dance music, might be evolving into emotional dance music. The development can be discerned in the rise of acts such as Bicep, who cycle stylishly between melancholy and euphoria, and Fred Again, whose diaristic songs include a bricolage of people’s voices sharing their hopes and fears.

Overmono are touted as the next breakthrough act to follow the aforementioned ones. They are a Welsh duo comprising brothers Tom and Ed Russell. Both have separate backgrounds in underground club culture, a history of hard-edged techno and rave records released under plosive-accented stage names like Truss and Tessela. Having joined forces as Overmono in 2016, Good Lies is their debut album.

Opening track “Feelings Plain” sets out its stall. Rather than the full onrush of action that a rising electronic music act might have once deployed, like their exalted Tom and Ed namesakes The Chemical Brothers, here we find a fluttery heartbeat tempo and a female vocalist singing about wanting to find someone to believe in. The pace picks up on the title track with a fast latticework of breakbeats, but again a singer is prominent. As so often in music, the human voice is the key to unlocking an emotional response.

The risk lies in what that voice might be uttering, as with the sentimental slogans in Fred Again’s albums. Overmono sidestep this danger. Derived from samples of R&B and pop songs, the fragments of singing are chopped-up and pitch-shifted so that we experience vocal feeling without always understanding what’s being phrased. Satisfyingly chewy basslines and granular percussion also show attentiveness to texture. Thumbs up, in short.

★★★★☆

‘Good Lies’ is released by XL Recordings