That’s How They Do

Public Memory “The Line”

“The Line” will sound immediately familiar to anyone who spent a lot of time listening to the groovy nightmare music coming out of the U.K. at the end of the 1990s – UNKLE, Tricky, Primal Scream, Radiohead, Portishead, etc. It’s the hip-hop beat reconfigured as a death march; the electronic tones that sound like security alarms; the grinding terror and pervasive pre-millennium tension. Robert Toher, the writer and producer of this track, is also the vocalist, and somehow he manages to sound like Portishead’s Beth Gibbons singing through a speaker phone in a conference room. The music is very dystopian, but there’s a feeling through it that things are about to get much worse. Though this evokes music from 20+ years ago, you certainly can’t say that this is retro – this is what the world is like all the time lately, all those Brits just saw the future clearly. Toher is just capturing the mood rather than predicting it.

Buy it from Bandcamp.