Release Date: Feb 28, 2012
Genre(s): Electronic, Pop/Rock
Record label: Splendour
Music Critic Score
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As future robot historians will inevitably note, a plague swept through the society of machines in the third millennium. In chillwave and drag house, in post-dubstep and R&B, in neo-IDM and electronic psychedelia, palsied drum machines lurched and staggered. Ailing synths with gummy keys coughed out sickly pitches. As the precision of machines tightened around us, we forced them to be everything that didn't come naturally to them: faulty, erratic, human.
120 Days II has a brief running time but it fills it with a unified vision. Unfortunately, there’s not too much to make that vision stand out. It also struggles with an over-reliance on the EDM genre, which provides a limited palette. However, when the band strays from that and lets itself dip into more ambient territory, it seems to take on new life.
120 Days used to record post-punk material under the name Beautiful People, and they've infused their take on space disco with, at times, a confrontational attitude. (Their first singles as 120 Days—"Come Out, Come Down, Fade Out, Be Gone" and "Sleepwalking"—placed a Public Image Ltd-esque quality atop their 4/4 credentials. ) Their second album, simply titled II, has more of an electronic shine, but they unfortunately don't fully jettison the Krautrock-like moods, making for a record where two sounds coexist more than fully gel together.