by Tom Schulte
Picking up on the ear-catching, edgy segmented rhythms of the breakbeat wave on Flux, Love Spirals Downward updates their sound, leaving the creative core intact. It's all about texture in this multi-layered album of Suzanne Perry's atmospheric vocals, brightly strummed acoustic guitar, and urgent electro-beats. While Perry's long phrasing meets the moderate rhythms to imply a midpoint, ocean coast sonic waves ebb and flow over the listener intoxicatingly. Indeed, &Sound of Waves& is the name of one of these undulating tracks. Swirling and merging, this duo's techno-psychedelic (psychedelia implied by the gentle nod of the content without considering their titular acronym) ballads of love lost or failed (&Psyche,& &By Your Side,& and &I'll Always Love You&) are constructed in a way that owes as much to the accessibility of pop as it does to current forms of electronica.