Soulwax – All Systems Are Lying
The vast majority of the career of Belgian musical brothers David and Stephen Dewaele has been, in a word, complicated. As producers and DJs they helped redefine what “the mix” could be: contributing to the blog-house/indie-dance movements and beyond, radio beatmatching and tastemaking between disparate and unlikely genres, legitimizing mashups, combining the DJ set and the VJ set, and even elevating that combination to filmic art. And it’s kind of wild to think that all of that work spun out from their original rock band Soulwax, an outfit itself which has spent the last 20-plus years releasing albums that were projects, experiments, or compilations of these. All Systems Are Lying is the first Soulwax album since 2004’s Any Minute Now that feels like the band coming out of the studio with just a set of discrete songs.
Even this is something of a misnomer, as the LP not only has an obvious overarching theme but finds Soulwax trying to make a rock album with just the brothers’ home studio essentials: modular synths, live drums, tape machines, processed vocals. (All Systems Are Lying, indeed, including this one.) Challenge accepted and well met. The music still clearly connects to the snarl and hops of the genres Soulwax came up through in the early 2000s. You can also hear it channel those 1990s moments when fat, chewy grooves from big beat royalty supported actual pop vocals and lyrical structures, digitizing rock’s sensibilities. And the instrumentation and arrangements are such that you could easily picture a more traditional band replacing electronic parts with electric ones. I assume Soulwax contemporaries like Franz Ferdinand or The Strokes could pretty convincingly cover music from this album like “Idiots in Love” with actual guitars.
Maybe even more importantly, All Systems Are Lying is made by tech obsessives about the current duality of tech obsessions: the yin of how they’re affecting art, trust, and society, and the yang of how spontaneity, intuition, and the analog may still be saving graces. “You don’t seem to realize/It’s happening right in front of you,” Soulwax explain on “Polaris,” recognizing that constantly responding to content on screens changes both individuals and the world in which they live. “It’s happening all because of you.” And in a subsequent breath on “The False Economy,” the Dewaeles lead a basic yet full rejection of feeding into these encroaching algorithms—“Your potential matches, I always hated who you like”—underpinned by a midtempo version of the skronky synths that powered their remix of Marie Davidson’s infamous “Work It”.
That All Systems Are Lying ends on the spare grind of “Engineered Fantasy” and the piano figure “Distant Symphony” reinforces its level of introspection, but don’t think for a second that this album can’t bang. “Run Free” is the first of multiple suggestions that the imperfections of handmade art give it its charm and excitement, and the first track to get heads nodding with the band’s signature jittery arpeggiated keyboards. “Gimme a Reason” is the best such suggestion, meanwhile, a catalog magnum opus on the level of LCD Soundsystem’s “Someone Great” that builds to a scraping climax on the back of creator-friendly affirmations like, ”If you can’t break the rules, just walk away.” Soulwax’s observations don’t have to be complicated, because at this point they’re pretty universal, but the courage of our current moment might come from saying them at all. And it takes decades of massaging both earnest and absurd energies for the Dewaeles to say the most serious things they’ve ever said and still make them sound like a fucking party.
Label: Because
Year: 2025
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Soulwax : All Systems Are Lying
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