Album Review: Impressions by Music Go Music

The second album by LA’s Music Go Music is so perfect it’s unnerving. There’s an alien, hyper-polished quality to its nine songs of torrid passion, tortured memory and disco fervour, as though they were recorded not by flesh-and-blood people but clones of Abba who dance by night and plug themselves into an electric current by day. In a sense, that’s not far from the truth: the trio behind this exaltation of 1970s pop are fantastical constructs, adopted by three otherwise self-effacing musicians – singer Meredith Metcalf and her lyricist/musician husband David (pictured below), and guitarist Adam Siegel – as a means to total, uninhibited, wanton excess.

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Music Go Music took a long time to release their third album, Impressions. It arrived nearly five years after Expressions, which raises the question of what they were doing all that time. From the sound of it, they were tinkering with, and ultimately perfecting, a very particular musical equation: what would you get if you took the icy, remote pop of disco-era ABBA and added just a touch of the warm, enveloping sound of peak period Fleetwood Mac? You'd get some pretty genius pop if the results were cooked just right, and Music Go Music come about as close as anyone could ever expect.

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There is nothing subtle about what Music Go Music does on Impressions, their first release in five years. Everything is big, bombastic and steeped in the overindulgence of mid-‘70s pop music. Often sounding like the unholy marriage of ABBA and ELO, Music Go Music have taken diligent notes, studying what makes the best moments of the biggest records by these two groups work as they do, mashing the somewhat disparate styles together to create a gloriously enormous dance pop record that sounds just as good if not better than anything either produced.

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In the five years between Music Go Music's debut and Impressions, their sophomore LP, the L.A. trio found themselves engaged in a number of musical projects, some fruitful (releasing the third album by their doppelganger group Bodies of Water, developing a sci-fi musical) and others disastrous (writing music to a cancelled German TV show and for a film that later proved to be some sort of befuddling scam). But for all the adventures Music Go Music have experienced, the music on Impressions hasn't changed one iota.2009's Expressions was part musical experiment, part labour of love, and Impressions finds the trio refusing to move past those novel intentions.

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