Playlouder - Music is the Network

Now, there's a little Swedish band you might have heard of called 'Gentle Touch' - if you've been to one of my semi-legendary dinner parties, that is. They're hot property in my palatial Pimlico kitchen right now. Everybody who comes over wants to leave with my Gentle Touch album, 'In Memory of Savannah' - 100% fact. But I just can't seem to let go of it.

I only play brilliant music, particularly with the thought of aiding digestion at the back of my mind. And yet this is the one album that everybody comments on - that nobody wants me to turn down so they can enthuse about my flambéd squid or quiz me over the preparatory techniques for my Fly Agaric soufflé.

There's no denying that at first listen this sounds like a Best of the 80s compilation album. (A damn good one, mind.) Listeners often ask "Is this A-ha?" during 'Expectations', or "Is this Depeche Mode?" during 'The View'.

The more it sinks in though, the more the unifying bliss of the ice-sculpture production and the draining emotional weight of the distant, echoing vocals really get under your skin. It's no pastiche, it's an enormous achievement - I mean, a whole decade of music, so many great bands, all distilled here in one (short) album, and somehow what's left is so much greater, purer, and more personal even, than any other electronic pop album I can name right now, past or present.

"You're staring at her now / You try to figure out / Who is she? / Why is she standing next to me?" they sing on 'The View'. It's not really dinner party music at all, actually - I think that's why it goes down so well: it makes you long for the glory moments of the dingiest nightclubs, perfect solitude and endless yearning; it's all about the robotic, euphoric synth that carries 'Once You Used To' - the 'Master and Servant'-style menace of 'Sonnenfinsternis', and the utterly blissful melancholy of 'On the Verge of Tears'.

No joke, this is mega. And if I were Dutch swimmer Pieter van den Hoogenband I'd be bloody chuffed to have a song written about me. (And what a song!)

You'd be a stupid fucking idiot to miss out on this.