For a group who call themselves Evil House Party, they're dangerously delicate. Twist them and they will tear. Tear them and they will thank you for committing such a transgression. This is leather-clad EDM (Evil Dance Music) for hard bodies looking to break hearts in the heat of the night, amongst a swarm of lasers, strobes and clouds of glycol-based mist... but even when the band is threatening to steal your soul with a kiss and a hard sidelong glance, it is hard to ignore the longing in their eyes- a driving lust for passion, yes, but maybe also for annihilation. A yearning for an intimacy that will reduce them to cinders.
This tension between cruelty and receptivity is what keeps the tight-rope of their EP Grand Theft Audio on its feet and in the air. They don't hide this dichotomy from the listener either, exposing the weeping heart at the center of their elegantly austere facade on the opening track. There singer Emma Acs etches a sumptuously sadistic scene where two shadowy figures meet after dusk in a parking lot following a rain. One slips, and while prone, feels the sting of the other's heel in her hand, and hears his voice descending to ear, telling her how he wants to know the cruelty that only she can visit upon him- a request or demand that implies a kind of dark familiarity between them, a relationship that is moored in destruction as much as devotion.
Next, the uninhibited, rubber-legged, clap and crawl of "Head Held High" extols the listener to abandon their reservations and leap above the fog of their nerves and hesitations to find some great and strange pleasure above and beyond the current limits of their present experience. "Keep Going On" is similarly goading, with Emma channeling a Shirley Manson-like siren as she raises her voice above beat-maestro Jacob Formann's crushing eddy of inky, turbulent percussion and capsizing grooves.
"Wicked" has a colder feel than the previous tracks from the outset, emphasizing the deep alienation it harbors, amongst a mix that steadily becomes more thermally charged as it progresses, with cuffs of rattling percussion, steady revolutions of brooding synths, and pitch-shifting contortions working to loosen its joints, allowing hot super-charged blood to flow freely to its clenched fist and steal-tow boot sheathed feet.
There are a fair number of woman/man duos performing some variety of synth anchored and '80s cinema-pulp informed dark pop out there, but Evil House Party feels like they are taking the template to its imaginative limits, both in terms of the aesthetic's cooly calculated constitution, but also the atavistic and reified merger of Thanatos and Eros that is its quintessence. Hand over the keys to your sense of control tonight, because where Let Evil House Party is taking you on Grand Theft Audio, you won't need, nor want it.
