- Fall On Your Sword's "The First Time I Saw Jupiter," DFA's first foray into Autonomic-style half-speed stepping—wait, did I just include "DFA" and "Autonomic" in the same sentence? Yes, I did, and yes, this record actually makes a whole lot of sense. Snipped from Will Bates and Phil Mossman's score from the recent film Another Earth, "The First Time I Saw Jupiter" has the feel of contemporary drum & bass, but the inimitably analog sound palate is 100% DFA. (Granted, the imprint aren't the sole practitioners of this hardware fetish.) Piling on the layers, the pressure valve finally opens at about the halfway mark and shoots things pretty deep into space. Euphoria might not be the right word, but Fall On Your Sword, like Instra:mental and dBridge, know how to build up a very sweet sort of tension.
"Rhoda's Theme," with palpitating pitched percussion and smacking snares, also plays around with the fast/slow tempo divide, though its disco-like stomp will feel more familiar to this label's followers. It's impeccably arranged and about as soaring as synth pop gets, with mile-wide arpeggios, operatic vocals and contrails of noisy synthesizers. While not adding up to much of a dance floor record, both sides have the immersive production and epic sweep of one.
Tracklist A The First Time I Saw Jupiter
B Rhoda's Theme