Pink Drone – Fluxus

Hip SlangReleased: 23rd November 2020

Pink Drone is the solo project of Herefordshire-based John Rose who took the opportunity to focus on his music over the 2020 lockdowns resulting in the release of his debut album, Fluxus, near the end of the year. This was the culmination of a prolific few months for the multi-instrumentalist who released the five-track Sleeper EP before the troubles began in January and followed it up with the seven-track Visitors EP in July. Fluxus contains twelve tracks and comes in at just under forty minutes, being very classical in form with most of the songs hovering around the three minute mark. Pink Drone’s sound also borders on the classical, being synth-driven post-punk with plenty of references leaping to mind, including early Human League, Wire and Joy Division. The overriding mood here is one of disconnection and no doubt the crisis bought about by the pandemic has helped in this, though it can’t be said that Fluxus depicts total darkness with Rose on occasion offering up some lighter touches. Opener ‘The Light’ offers a deep contrast between the coldness of the music and the lyric which encourages us to “feel the light in your heart”. The synths are remote, the drum beat distant and lonely, and the mood is maintained by the second track ‘Radiation’ which inevitably sounds like the Joy Division classic that used our (then) record label’s name. The vocal is again disjointed and fits well in front of the doomy synth that plays music for a robot dance. Just as it appears that everything in the Pink Drone world is in shadow, the light synth pop of ‘Signals’ bursts through the gloom as it chimes along jauntily. ‘Zeitgeist’ also is inherently uplifting despite some wooshing and moaning. Back on the dark side, ‘Doppelganger’ is hopelessly dislocated and the ominous, flickering instrumental ‘European’ is particuarly edgy as it brushes off waves of distortion. It’s certainly one of the highlights here, as is ‘The Underground’ in which the plangent guitars add a welcome new texture. It has been so long since we have heard an album like this that it took us by complete surprise. It’s the sort of record that could have been put out by Factory Records in 1980, but is a very welcome addition to the 2020s. Available on CD from Bandcamp.