Album Review: Siamese Youth "Electric Dreams" New RetroWave Records

"Electric Dreams", A Satisfying Soundtrack To Drift You Away

It’s 7:00 am on a late summer’s mid-week morning as I hit the play button and sit back to garner first impressions of this debut album; as my train heads towards the city, I find myself getting distracted by other passengers, watching passing views of the city, traffic, peoples back yards, rear windows and then plunged into the rattling blackness of the first tunnel as I head further East.

Electric Dreams immediately puts me in a reflective frame of mind, as all the aspects of the production and writing are high quality, I find myself drifting into a cinematic mood at times, and as the day progresses, I keep returning back to familiarise, to see if I can find solace or friendship in the lyrics or melodies, I feel I can.

A marked improvement (production-wise) from their 2018 cover of Blink 182’s “All the Small Things” Electric Dreams offers a set of well produced, well written songs (also mixed & mastered by Hadl) and instrumentals that feel very ‘tied together’, consistent, just the right texture and emotions to reflect the Synthwave genre and belong as one body of work.

Ten tracks in total, with 2 tracks previously released (Lying to myself & Nariyeh Thanei ft. Futurecop), one Instrumental track “Lovers” and seven lyrical offerings to stir the mind and lead it onwards.

Overall, as the title suggests, Electric Dreams has a vibey and fantasy feel to it, any track immediately takes you away from current thoughts and woes, putting you in a reflective frame of mind, the lyrics have a very comfortable and soothing feel to them and are well written, recorded and mixed leaving us to enjoy the dulcet tones of Mark Gritsenko, with Hadl also featuring vocally on “Coco” and “Yesterday”.

At times I could be listening to Cut Copy! “Yesterday” reminds me a little of “Video Killed the Radio Star” and they have definitely taken a leaf out of the Max Martin school of modern song arranging via use of the “woa woahs”.

In terms of favourites, I’m sure there will be many amongst fans due to the high standard of song writing, composition & arrangement as well as quality instrumentation and smaller ear-gasmic detail in strategic places.  Personally I like "Dream On" & "Lying to Myself", but I’m sure "Coco" will also reverberate in many other eardrums.

Interview with Mark Gritsenko & Christoph Hadl 

Can you tell us about how you set about writing and producing the Album?

We met each other around 5 years ago in Berlin & our musical partnership grew from occasional collaborations to writing more & more songs together & finally forming Siamese Youth last year. 

After winning the remix contest from NewRetroWave for Futurecop we were inspired to follow up with more songs so we actually wrote and produced a whole EP!

Since we were already in touch with NRW we knew they should be the first to hear our stuff, and their response was both amazing and surprising - they offered us a record deal for a full length album!  So we went back to the studio to write more tracks full of motivation to get the record done, and… we made it. We can’t thank NewRetroWave enough for supporting us the way they have..

Did you have a vision in mind?

We knew for sure we wanted it to be nostalgic and dreamy and at the same time we wanted to bring something new to the genre, bringing our darker rock side into the mix. There’s a lot of guitars on the record and lyrically it’s quite personal and vulnerable. Ultimately, our vision is always to connect with our listeners. We hope there are people out there who feel the same and find a resonance in our music and lyrics.

What are your musical influences?

Our personal influences are quite different but we both are sure that this is only an enrichment. They start with 80’s bands like Alphaville, New Order, A-ha and others over to recent Synthwave acts like The Midnight or Futurecop! But in between there are more outside influences that you might hear on the record. From punk rock (checkout our Blink-182 cover!) along Indie to Emo there are many many different styles that have various impacts on our music.

What is your go-to tech for making music?

There is no one particular “go-to” technique. Even developing ideas varies a lot. It might be an instrumental hook, a melody or a phrase for lyrics. Then the rest follows that root idea.

From a technical standpoint, it’s all in the box. We tend to get too excited to finish the tracks as soon as possible, so using software allows us to try a whole bunch of ideas quite fast and keep the momentum going. Mark mostly uses TAL, Massive, Spire and Serum for synths and usually takes care of guitars, recording them via live amps and then messing around with some FXs in Guitar Rig. Christoph’s favorites are TAL, Arturia CS-80, SonicProjects OP-X. He also did all the mixing and mastering on “Electric Dreams”.

What's the most unusual idea you've finished as a track?

We wanted to have many surprising moments on “Electric Dreams”! It starts right on the first track “1984”. We wanted to make a transition from the regular vocal sound to the computer voice in the chorus. Soon that last sentence in the verse you can already hear the vocoder coming in and the human voice disappear. The guitar solo in “Final Straw” was quite an experiment as well. All we can say is, it's not a guitar! Ha! The track title “Nariyeh Thanei” is quite unusual as well but we blame Futurecop! for that. You can go and find out what it means – you will be astonished. There are small hidden surprises everywhere – the instrumental ideas that we had will be audible even more when we put out “Electric Dreams” as an instrumental version (no set date, but this is planned).

What is your next focus, touring the album?

We wanna go out and play! We were so amazed by the reactions to our first singles and the album that we can't wait to go out and present the tracks live. We are working on dates (proposals welcome) At the same time we want to work on new songs. So stay tuned!

Review by Frank Mac, Planet Synthwave blog
With thanks to Siamese Youth (Mark Gritsenko & Christoph Hadl) & Rich Millin (Play Dead Music) & Mizucat