With 'Today,' the artist also known as Tom Holkenborg returns to himself
Junkie XL is a rare electronic dance music artist who doesn't come from DJ culture and doesn't necessarily want to be a superstar spinner. His music often disregards the artificial boundaries of contemporary e-music - DJ-friendly song structures, unnecessary drum rolls, loopy synths - in favor of rock 'n' roll aggression, singer-songwriter introspection, and cinematic ambition. Yet, Junkie XL is a massive club star, his studio skills are worshipped by the remix generation, and his sound is rockin', bangin', and otherworldly.
On Today, due Tuesday, the artist also known as Tom Holkenborg pinches his guitar strings for bright, Bernard Sumner notes and also lets the pick fly for whirling, metallic bliss, à la Catherine Wheel. The beats play on, crisp and orderly, and the orbiting tracks are synched up digitally, but there's release, magic, and even a bit of that old "nostalgia for the future" in your headphones. When Billy Corgan tried to go electronic, this is what he must have had in mind. The record, Holkenborg admits, is as rocking as it is "melancholy," as sneeringly punk as it is romantic, as hand-raising as it is shoegazing. Songs such as "Drift Away" glow wistfully under the heat of an old flame, while "Yesterdays" flashes back across oceans of time, and the title track pogos forward in perfect, disco-punk syncopation. Longtime friend Lucas Banker helped write. Nathan Mader comes strong to the mike with subtle urgency. They make you want to pick up a skateboard and be an '80s kid again.
"I don't want to make the same record twice," says Holkenborg, 38. "I know it's done in the electronic world, when there's a successful formula. And I love a kick drum with some sounds. But I want to reinvent myself with every album."
Today is a breeze compared to Junkie XL's last full-length, 2004's Radio JXL: A Broadcast from the Computer Hell Cabin, a three-part (two discs, one downloadable section) progressive-house manifesto that had Gary Numan, Dave Gahan, and Robert Smith, among others, lending fresh vocals to blazingly upbeat grooves. It was the album that contained "A Little Less Conversation," the Elvis-sampling, shimmy-shaking, Euro-chart-capping theme to NBC's Las Vegas. And it had Holkenborg essentially saying he could do super-club music bigger and better than superstar DJs, and get some of postpunk's brightest stars to join him.
The year before, KCRW (89.9 FM) DJ and Matrix franchise music supervisor Jason Bentley had persuaded the former industrial-rocker to move to California from Holland to work on film scores. He learned something that proved useful in making Today. "Instead of going all over the place, you focus, or you lose the story," he says. "I only spent three months on the album. Every day we just sat down and played riffs." Most of the songs were written on guitar, and then he programmed the beats. "It makes it more direct and from the heart. I just wrote 10 tracks, and that's what ended up on the album. It's refreshing."
Indeed, blink and Today is gone, swept away like a vapor trail against a Pacific sunset, leaving a wisp of enchantment in your heart. The collection is as paradoxical as modern e-music, which has created some of the era's best hip-hop (Chemical Brothers' Grammy-winning "Galvanize"), classic rock (Deep Dish featuring Stevie Nicks' "Dreams" redux), and alt-rock (Today), while still remaining under the mainstream radar. To be sure, Today is not the stab at crossover success that Radio JXL was.
"For the last four or five years, I've been working on big projects with well known names, on my last album, on remixes for Coldplay and Britney, and on movies," Holkenborg says, "and I wanted to go back to myself and work on a personal record. I was definitely in a melancholic mood. It's about missing friends, missing home. That's the beauty of melancholy: You bend it to the left, it's sad, and to the right, there can be some joy."
He finds life is grand in Venice, within earshot of the sea, where he does what he loves every day on to-die-for home-studio gear (a five-figure Kyma sound-design system), including scoring music for the forthcoming game adaptation Dead or Alive.
"Today is where I am, here in Venice, and where I am musically in this moment," Holkenborg says. "I don't know if this is where I'll be tomorrow. But for now, this is it."
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