There is an interesting duality found in “Burned Romances,” the latest release from CS Hellmann, music that exists between worlds, not quite in one or the other. It echoes elements of music’s post-punk past, a dark, synth-infused blend of sophisticated textures that emerges where the digital and analog worlds dance in harmony, but it also shimmers with forward-thinking potential.
But that is the joy of making music in the post-genre world, the old tribalisms and their rules and expectations are long gone, no longer fit for purpose, and musicians like Hellmann are free to find inspiration where they may, whichever sound or style, era or age, genre or geography they find of use to them.
And so, “Burning Romances” is forged of driving, digital beats and resonant bass lines, guitars that jar and jangle, shimmer and chime, all coated in waves and washes of synth texture. But for every hint of the eighties and specifically a dark and early, pre-commercial, dreamscape, New Romantic sound, there are hints of the neo-psychedelic sonics so favoured by bands such as War on Drugs. For each nod to the past, there is a strident focus on the future.
CS Hellmann certainly knows where he is coming from, but it is where he is going that is of more interest to him… and indeed to us. Or, better still, given that everything is cyclical, that fashion ebbs and flows over relatively short time-spans, that the sounds of the past always predict the future, and the future always echoes with the sounds of what has gone before, it is his understanding that the musical timeline is anything but linear which makes his music so exciting.
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