In this early 2000s release, Colder’s Wrong Baby shares a poignant reminder that excitement can be found in the wrong places, and painfully so. French one-man band Marc Nguyen Tan scores here with such a gifted addictiveness as to be the veritable aural lucre of the gods.
“Pretending…
Is not an option,
The real thing lives,
Within different motions”
The sound is definitely Colder, freezing to be precise, and despite his obvious testimony and moniker to that fact, idiotic supposed “high-level reviewers” perversely tangle and moronically attempt to discredit his musical art with vexingly inane arguments — though not all. Now defunct Stylus Magazine described Colder’s sound on this album ‘Heat‘ as, “Vulcanized basslines, ice-burn synth washes, and helium-fused guitar lines again serv(ing) as his trademarks.“
More properly, Brainwashed.com embraced his overall sound and elegantly argued against the naysayers. “Tan’s rhythmic sense is at once funky and awkward. Even when a song is thumping forward in standard time, Marc manages to make the rhythm sway and stagger like it’s ready to fall apart. In some cases, he’ll use every one of the instruments in a song to help create a kind of dizzying effect, as on ‘Wrong Baby’ and ‘Losing Myself.’ In both cases, the entire ensemble throbs and reverberates together, creating a mechanical effect that’s as hypnotic as it is cold and robotic.” Noting that while there may be some repetitiveness, this should not immediately dissuade someone from listening to an otherwise Kraftwerk married Joy Division harmonization in a splendidly unionized and complementary duality.
“I got such a crush,
When I look to your eyes,
Feeling I got a dangerous,
New experience to try”
The implied inkiness of the track’s subject matter notwithstanding, there is an improper servitude to the perverse that evokes an inverse reminder of the foolishness of stepping outside the boundaries of society’s edges to the defect of one’s own character.
That said, it’s an impossibly fun and danceable track with its cleverly made stop-motion video and pretty model’s catchy head-bopping seeming to predate the cat meme we’re all so familiar with. Enjoy.
