The Sick Man of Europe - The Intermittent Signal Review
The Sick Man of Europe draw on Joy Division and Arthur Rimbaud for an album that urges us to disconnect from the online world and find something human in the analogue.
The Intermittent Signal sounds like a call to arms against the forces keeping us distracted, isolated and staring at screens. The Joy Division comparisons that have followed The Sick Man of Europe are easy to understand, but the band’s cold-wave dystopia feels idiosyncratic and uncomfortably timely. The title track grows increasingly intense, made for a sweltering, two-hundred-capacity room like the Old Blue Last or the Shacklewell Arms. It captures something of the late 70s and early 80s without treating the past as somewhere we can simply return to. Is there still a place for this sort of underground music in a world consumed by the online? On the strength of this record, there very much is.
‘If you’re not exploiting yourself, you’re exploiting somebody else,’ comes the line on ‘Negative Stimuli’. Over mechanical drums and synths that bring Depeche Mode and Suicide to mind, it makes the album’s sense of dread feel immediate. The song could soundtrack a nightclub fight scene in John Wick, but underneath that cinematic momentum is a more troubling thought about the demands we place on ourselves and each other. The vocals can sound almost devoid of emotion at first, yet the more the rhythm presses forward, the harder it becomes to hear them as resigned. There is anger in this music, and an urge to act on it.
One of the record’s points of reference is Radio Alice, the countercultural station that broadcast from Bologna in the late 1970s. The Sick Man of Europe clearly know the political and artistic history they’re drawing on, but the record lives through its sound as much as its ideas. Pulsating beats and repeated phrases pull you into a trance, building a wall of noise that feels designed to be heard at full volume in a room with other people.
Midway through the album, ‘The Cadogan Gate’ follows ‘Apathy’ with a title that could belong to a pulp science-fiction novel. Its steady beat gives way to a song that builds patiently, then hits harder when the rhythm kicks in. ‘Now every future seems the same’ is its bleakest line: a moment when the possibility of change appears to have narrowed to nothing. Yet the track keeps moving, even as its words suggest defeat. That tension between resignation and momentum gets to the heart of The Intermittent Signal. ‘I’ll try this time to be just fine’, the voice pleads, sounding unconvinced.
The record moves between post-punk and krautrock without losing that sense of unease. On ‘Apathy’, the synths bleep into the void as the song circles the wish to unsend something already said. ‘Creatures of Habit’ brings another voice into the gloom, giving it a strange, Lynchian quality, as though you’ve wandered into the wrong room in Mulholland Drive. These shifts give the album range without breaking its spell.
The Intermittent Signal is an intense follow-up that makes good on the promise of The Sick Man of Europe’s debut. It is preoccupied with systems that leave people passive, but its rhythms refuse to sit still. This is music for an underground room full of people who might, for a little while, put their phones away and listen to one another.