05 10

Various Artists PC Music Volume 1 PC Music

09.06.15

Here we fecking go eh – all the hits from dance music’s most impassioned cranks, with the exception of the one legitimate ‘hit’ (out of interest, has anyone real gotten hold of an actual can of QT yet? Bell me pronto! My money’s good!). The problem here is that no matter what I write, the joke is effectively on me. “It’s all so simple,” read Hannah Diamond’s tee at Pop Cube, the label’s recent “multimedia reality network” event which saw members of the collective rocking up in limos and greeting fake members of the press, before making their way to the stage where little attempt was made to hide the fact of their pre-recorded sets.

Diamond’s tee is a very tongue in cheek way of acknowledging that attempting to critically dig below the pristine gloss of the label’s surface means getting hopelessly caught up in PC Music’s high-flown and contradictory dialogues on artifice within art. Which kind of kills the vibe. But how useful might coming to terms with the post-internet, mutant-idol funsters be? Have PC Music artists, producing at the intersection of irony and sincerity, found new ways to teach us things about ourselves? Hannah Diamond’s heartbroken anthems lay bare the fundamentally arrested development of nearly everyone in their 20s.

GFOTY’s ADHD on a track like Don’t wanna / Let’s do it is like being dragged somewhere you really don’t want to go by someone you really, actually want to hang out with. Lipgloss Twins’ Wannabe is the sound of online anxiety creeping into our IRL interactions. But then, such is the fear that PC Music’s mess of contradictions have managed to strike into the hearts of music writers that maybe none of that’s really true? It’s hard to reconcile all of this on a one to twenty rating scale, so let me break down how this has been scored – 2 points for Danny ‘dick in the pants’ Harle for having arguably the funniest moniker out, 2 for those ‘Red Bull own PC Music’ rumours that you yourselves probably started, and 6 for GFOTY who weirdly reminds me of my mum.

Jokes on you Cook! For all you know I didn’t even give it a proper listen!

(Note from Ed: This review was written prior to 8 June; Xavier’s mother wholeheartedly condemns comments made by GFOTY in her recent Field Day review).