Lindstrøm – Smalhans
Hans-Peter Lindstrøm (Hansi Pansi, to his close friends) is a Norwegian producer who works under the name Lindstrøm. He is also the founder of Feedelity label, the label coincidentally releases a fair bit of Lindstrøm material. Anyway, that’s enough of the wikipedia copy-paste waffle because we’d rather talk about how his new album, ‘Smalhans‘ as it’s the best album to be released this year.
This is cover-art for ‘Smalhans‘, we’ve added Gachapin & Mukku because the lady on the cover-art looked like she needed cheering up, maybe she didn’t know she was going to be the cover-art for ‘Smalhans‘ and that’s why she looks so worried. She’s probably thinking, “I hope my face isn’t going to be used for the next James Blake album, he’s really boring and my friends will think I’m boring, OH GOD NO“.
The album was mixed by Todd Terje, we aren’t too sure what to say about this because we aren’t sure if Todd Terje is a massive sell-out or not. His song ‘Eurodans‘ went to No.1 with Robbie Williams vocals thrown on top of it. He’s also in Rolling Stones Most EDM DJ’s list. However, that seems to be because 2012 is the year that everybody says they like Todd Terje without having heard any of his work…. hmmm.
(This is what we imagine Todd Terje’s studio looks like these days. Norwegian swag)
‘Smalhans‘ is made-up of six tracks. Some people would say, “Six tracks isn’t long enough to be an album“, those people are wrong. Lindstrøm says it’s an album and is charging album-rates on this, so, it must mean it’s an album.
The first track on the album is, ‘Rà-àkõ-st’ (English translation: Horny Penguin) and it’s a good indicator of what awaits you (5 more very good tracks). This is Lindstrøm’s return to his playful Cosmic Disco world and not the slightly strange Medieval-Disco world of his last release, ‘Six Cups Of Rebel‘ (although, we quite liked that too). ‘Rà-àkõ-st’ is our favourite track on the album, it’s bit like Royksopp before they became confused.
And then we have, ‘Lāmm-ęl-āār ‘ (English translation: Word that english people can’t say, lol). You have to admire the consistancy of the second track being of a similar quality of the first track. Without spoiling it too much, tracks 3, 4 and 6 continue that consistancy. However, we are skipping those because we want to talk about….
‘Fāār-i-kāāl’ (English translation: Norway doesn’t like ‘EDM’ either) as it’s our favourite track on the album. Did we say that already? Um… it’s our joint favourite track on the album. It’s a good thing when you argue with yourself about what the best track on an album is, it means the album isn’t rubbish.
iTunes/ Beatport / An actual physical copy
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toomanysebastians
Ominous Presence
Gachapin appears in both pictures of the Smalhans artwork, do I win a prize?
he could have just put out that first song and called it an album. so so good. the last song gives me good feels too