Black Affair ||| Pleasure Pressure Point (2008)

Black Affair
Pleasure Pressure Point (2008)
Genre: Indie/Electronic/Dance/Techno

1. PPP
2. It Goes Like This
3. Just Keep Walking
4. It's Real
5. Japanese Happening
6. You And Me
7. Reel To Reel
8. Subfuge
9. Will She Come
10. Sweet
11. Tak! Attack!
12. Mute Me
13. Pills

Back from the crash and burn of the Beta Band. Back from the self-imposed obscurity of King Biscuit Time. Back in Black. Despite hawking up the remnants last week’s flu, Steve Mason’s in fine fettle. He sounds like he’s shadow boxing while he talks to me. Welcome to Black Affair. Black Affair create flab-free pop music. It’s a stripped down, mercilessly efficient vehicle for the genius of Steve Mason. The live show’s as deceptively minimal: “Me, my I Pod, one synth and a bass player. Everything sitting in one brief case. Throw it in the back of a B.M.W and fuck off.” As much as Manson’s previous projects dipped their collective toes into r’n’b, Black Affair dives head first into the digi-phunk ocean in an attempt to jettison history. “It was a conscious decision to re-define myself. After the Beta Band I knew I had to make a solo album so I resurrected King Biscuit Time. It’s a great record but I was too comfy. I wanted to keep changing – to push myself. To draw a line under the past and work up.” Shaping such a radically different sound needed some help. Step up Warp records wunder-kid, Jimmy Edgar. The result of this collaboration is Black Affair’s debut album, Pleasure Pressure Point. Its heart is true Detroit techno – synthetic yet soulful. A heady mash up of playfulness and melancholy. “This album is about a break up and the hurt and bitterness that goes with it. It’s also about sex. From now on, it’s all about sex. Devious sex. And looking good.” That makes sense. With track titles like Subterfuge and the very name, Black Affair, this is as far removed from sterile, white boy guitar slop as you’d expect from a maverick like Mason. Who, it must be said, looks hotter than ever before in recent press shots, courtesy of Jimmy Edgar. Looking modern and sounding modern. Pleasure Pressure Point is resolutely now in an 80s way but it has much more depth than anything out at the present aping that decade. First single, Tak! Attack!, is a vehement kiss off to an unspoken past: brutal lyrics rubbing up alongside infectious pop. There’s humour too. Forthcoming single, Same Same, is in Steve’s words, “a playground sing-along”. He’s not far off. A riotous collaboration with London rude grrrl, Miss Odd Kidd, it’s bad-ass-booty-bass-core of the most celestial calibre. Steve plays an intoxicated paramour and the aforementioned Miss Odd Kiss, the non-too enamoured date, trading verses to vicious effect. Yes, this is how it was meant to be. No beards. No acoustics. Pure sex.

-Rich Hanscomb(fusedmagazine.com)

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