Single Review: Beauty Product – Wild Parvenu

There are occasions when the sheer bloody minded hipsterism of releasing music on cassette can really bother me. Unsurprisingly, the Monday morning after I came back from the Bugged Out Weekender is one of those occasions –  and as such, I nearly passed over this 3 track cassette release from Beauty Product, out of some sort of reverse snobbery nonsense on my part. In the end I realised they'd stuck all the tracks up on Bandcamp (no need to crank up the ancient tape player…), and when I listened I realised what a silly bugger I am really, because all three tracks are superb. The opener, Wild Parvenu is some deep, melancholic house number slowed to a plod that breaks your heart. There are about 5 different elements in the track that a lesser producer would squeeze a single tune from – but in the hands of Beauty Product, we get a proper, slowly unraveling song. When a yearning vocal comes – followed by some synthetic flute – after half of the song has played, I'm sold.

Next up, If Only I'd Known Where You Buried My Heart pulls the same trick with disco elements, taking them slow, fuzzy and ever so slightly sorrowful, before throwing in some wonky pitch bent funk leads. Closer Silver in the Gray is a whole new kettle off fish, the tempos dropping even further to around 80 bpm, making some sort of sloth like luxurious industrial bashment for rewired 8 bit sex pests. It's as if Beauty Product have watched a whole lot of budget 80s sci-fi, then distilled every cheap, genius attempt at soundtrack menace into one 12 minute epic. Three out of three then for this tape release, well worth checking, and I get a strong feeling we havemn't heard the last from this lot. Stream/buy below.