gus gus - where are they?

i listened to Mexico a lot when it came out but find i rarely want to come back to it. Arabian Horse remains a masterpiece though, not a single weak track (even Magnified Love has some redeeming qualities).

i'm liking the latest (Lies Are More Flexible) a lot. it seems more subdued? like it's a winter album while Mexico was a summer album. and while some tracks are closer to Mexico (continuing the tradition of using perhaps the most boring track as the title track) Featherlight / Lifetime / Fuel would all fit on AH. Featherlight is beautiful, in the same manner Seamoss is but with vocal.

agreed on variety of voices! - while John Grant can replace Högni there are times on Fireworks and Lifetime where you can almost hear Earth bits here and there.

ha, Selfoss, not Seamoss!

bumping this because "Gun" is a really, really great song

Oh, I do love Gus Gus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3mwdn0rYjA

Siri, show me a video indebted to "Windowlicker" that is more restrained but more unsettling

Yes, that.

the album must be getting close! iirc correctly, Biggi said in an interview they were going to release 5 or so tracks before the album, and we now have:

Higher
Stay The Ride
Our World
Love Is Alone

loving all the new stuff. my comment above about Lies being a winter companion to summer Mexico - Biggi said something very close in the same interview, they had a bunch of more introvert / darker tracks, and Mexico (he didn’t name it but that’s what he likely was referring to) was the extrovert stuff they decided to release at the time.

and this collab with Bjarki is beautiful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjMyzCIe3PY

Strange. I love Gus Gus but feel like I've completely lost touch. Turns out that I've only missed "Lies ... ". "Love Is Alone" has sucked me back into their world.

i still regard the Attention - Forever - 24/7 run as aimless experimentation that resulted mostly in misses (with a few really great tracks), but feels like once they crystallized their sound on Arabian Horse, they’ve been following it to great results.

that's funny--arabian horse felt like a peak to me with diminishing returns after, but maybe i just never found a way into those later records. "love is alone" is great tho.

AH is still their greatest album, but Mexico and Lies are both very coherent and listenable albums, which can't be said about Forever / 24/7 which feel like half baked demos at times

Just playing Selfoss/Arabian Horse/Over and, yeah, that was an incredible version of Gus Gus.

Drunkenly re-reading this thread and ...

"I really thought they were going to be the new Underworld."

Yeah, this. I thought they were going to be fucking massive.

I also enjoyed reading this:

"I doubt I'll hear another album as obsessively designed as Arabian Horse from this year. Every surface is sandblasted aluminium, with but a few cues to the listener that mnml/tech house is another shape of folk music. Highly recommended for fans of Luomo."

And pleased to have found my old best of track list. Had forgotten about that.

was there a poll on AH? if not we should do one!

That playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/56sbweOgHClknuVP4utGw8

Hadn't quite realised that I was so pro-Polydistortion and then Arabian Horse.

Likely to have been compiled while messy and open to the idea that other tracks are better.

I only discovered Arabian Horse this year but it's probably my most played album of 2021. Really incredible sound design and tunes and vocals. All-around wonderful album

the new album is out!
https://gusgusiceland.bandcamp.com/album/mobile-home

Thanks! Good album but my God I've danced to "Simple Tuesday" all three times I've listened to it.

surprised it wasn’t one of the lead tracks!

some interesting bits in this interview: https://www.tanzgemeinschaft.com/gusgus-a-trip-down-memory-lane-14486

and this is a great behind the scene look album by album: https://grapevine.is/mag/feature/2020/08/19/gusgus-the-impossible-band-25-years-of-intrigue-drama-and-music/

lots of interesting details there. daníel was in eurovision?!

The Grapevine feature is, um, a curious thing. It's interesting, though.

I know surprisingly little about this band for how much I've listened to them, so the Grapevine retrospective was enlightening

Arabian Horse - or at least the tracks in my playlist - sounding incredible tonight.

You should add the other Arabian Horse tracks to your playlist as well because there isn’t a duff track on that album

i’d swap magnified love for something from mexico/lies/mobile home and then it’d be a perfect album

I love those quick synth note clusters in "Magnified Love", they make the track for me. I am using your worlds otm

i was going to say we should poll it again so i just went ahead and made a poll:
lost in your POLL - GusGus Arabian Horse

the cover of Fancy "Bolero" feat John Grant is out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIaiU-XIEbU

i would love a full italo disco GusGus album.. Ali Schwarz's remix is nice too

love the new track from GusGus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrw9E0IxZA0

Lies Are More Flexible and Mobile Home still feel like "winter" albums to me (while Mexico was a "summer" album) so it's great to get a proper summer anthem from them.