HTRK 'Work work, work'

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HTRK
Work (work, work)
Blast First Petite/Mistletone

It feels somehow both vulgar and insensitive to evaluate the change in a band's work after the death of one of their members, especially if the death was as tragic as that of HTRK's Sean Stewart, who took his life in early 2010. But Stewart's basslines were the sinuous, seductive underpinnings of the band's best songs, both ominous and surprisingly funky, meaning that for all their down tempo nature, the best songs on the band's fantastic debut album Marry Me Tonight were decidedly danceable (if, perhaps, you'd popped a couple of Vicodin first).

So the question of how the two remaining members — singer Jonnine Standish and guitarist Nigel Yang — would reinvent HTRK's sound in Stewart's absence is a relevant, if awkward, one. The answer comes with their second album Work (work, work), and it seems to be: with lots of synths. Work (work, work) is a very different beast to its predecessor — if anything, it's more down tempo than Marry Me Tonight, and the driving rhythms of that album are gone, replaced by reverb-laden electronic beats and narcotic, atmospheric synth pads.

The change means that Work (work, work) is less immediately appealing than its predecessor — whereas Marry Me Tonight had grooves, this record has a grinding relentlessness. First single 'Eat Yr Heart' will have given HTRK aficionados a sense of where the band were heading — an echoing, slooooow drum machine beat and rumbling synth bass, over which Standish intones "Your body's so perfect/You fill me up… then make me starve" in a voice that's disconcertingly detached and dispassionate.

Both the atmosphere and the subject matter are indicative of what you'll find on the rest of Work (work, work). Its press release describes it as "a flat-lined study of desire and submission, sentimentality and dysphoria", and while sentimentality is hard to find, the other three subjects pervade the lyrics of pretty much every song. It sounds like something you might hear at the sort of strange futuristic leather club that '90s film directors were fond of creating (cf. The Matrix, Strange Days, etc), a place where you've lost track of what time of night it is and the pleasure has long since stopped being pleasurable. The visions of sex that are on show are entirely removed from any emotion, and ultimately also from pleasure – the narcotised hedonism of songs like 'Love Triangle' ("He on she on me/She on me on he") or 'Work That Body' doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun – indeed, it sounds like hard work, a mechanical process of pistoning and grinding that's devoid of any humanity.

If there's respite to be found, it's perhaps in the closing 'Body Double', which begins with the line "The ice age is over", and sounds like pretty much exactly that — the moment when whatever you've taken is finally starting to wear off and the colourless dawn light is starting to play around the edges of the sky. But even there, the song also seems to summarise the underlying nature of the experiences depicted with the lines "There's nothing personal about it/It's just business, baby", which eventually devolve into the muffled refrain, "New blood for hire…"

All in all, notwithstanding (or perhaps because of) its subject matter, this is a sad record, and a difficult one. This shouldn't, incidentally, be interpreted as criticism, because it's just the opposite — Work (work, work) is a remarkable piece of, um, work, a record that's both frightening and seductive, an insight into a view of humanity that's not particularly pleasant, but all the more fascinating for being so. And it's a welcome, welcome return for a band who've endured an unimaginable bereavement and still managed to make another fantastic record.

Tom Hawking