Review: Heatsick “Re-Engineering”

24 Nov 2013 — Evelyn Malinowski

Heatsick's much anticipated album Re-Engineering, out today on PAN, sounds a lot like growing accustomed to summers in Berlin. It's awkwardly satirical, more of the same type of fun previously experienced but somehow more comfortable in its own skin, and scantily tropical. The latter emerges from the habit of Berlin crowds flocking to the parks with backpacks full of beer and crisps from the first day of sunshine, even if it's in March, making the city in the summer time a non-coastal, hipster, pasty leg beach party. 

While Warwick, the man behind the maracas, calls the emerging genre encountered on his new release “elastic goo house music,” it can be perhaps otherwise referred to as Ex-Pat Tosca-house. The album, its danceability, its lyrical and aural satire, all contribute to making the work challenging to peg, which is useful in the contemporary mood of internet-fed gender awareness. Perhaps the album spells it out quite clearly during the opening and title track: "invisible hand of god. Question mark. Question .... smart phone .... East London in West Kreuzberg...." this is a work of enveloped poetic cultural observation at the dawn of when we realize that things really are changing, traveling toward a delayed future: the response at this particular, and on this particular work, is distance created by satire. 

Knowing Berlin the way I do, I find that an album as sun-bathed and merry as this is nullified by lyrics like "it's all congealing/slightly numb-feeling/wish you were here" under the conditions that it was produced and shaped by the likes of the dark and disorienting German capital city. It does indeed have a "disruptive," impatiently-streaming-music, affect, and it is highly recommended for your contemplation.