Frankly I'm astounded.
Someone needs to sit me down and explain to me the attraction of CLOR. I love art-rock and bands like The Soft Boys, Sparks, Can, Devo, Talking Heads and Pavement were fine practitioners of this form but CLOR just don't seem to gel their influences very well at all. In fact they sound like a bad pastiche of 80's pop and have a tendency to dwell in a sonic world of gimmicks and glitches rather than focus their efforts on tunes and songs that pull together as a coherent whole. I too get bored with the predictability of verse/chorus/verse structures but if you're going to throw out this well-worn formula try and remember to put something back that isn't a rehash of the efforts of infinitely superior practitioners of left-field rock.
CLOR strive so hard to be "new" and "the future" but their fusion of stolen ideas lack character and, well, interest. Their sound often collapses in on itself into a tuneless morass of pointless sharp edges and discordant melodies. 'Stuck In A Tight Spot' is the prime contender for this meaningless angularity: a song that is devoid of any rhyme or reason and so in love with its "hey I'm so different" structure that you just want to take it outside and shoot it.
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Fleetingly they suggest some sense of lucidity but it is sporadic and far too often separated by music that is frighteningly and underwhelmingly absymal. I am currently hating 'Garden Of Love' to bits but I may soon move onto a powerful aversion to 'Gifted', their 'acoustic' track that has a hollowness to it that starkly highlights the lack of substance to the songs that surround it.
An empty shell of a record that gives truth to the hoary contention of music purists that synthesisers will be the death of music.
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