“Compulsion” opens with a lovely haunting soundscape to which Schueber’s vocals – driven by playful, strutting beats – pair perfectly. It’s not my favorite track, but I appreciate Scheuber’s willingness to experiment and explore the different approaches synthpop songwriting can take. Vocals and music shift in style throughout the track, taking the listener in unexpected directions. ![]() “Get Well Soon” is a more eclectic beast, opening with playful organ sounds swept aside by fast percussive rhythms and loud, fat beats. There’s an ’80s new wave element to this track, resplendent in its pompous beats and keys, also an echo of the darkness that emerged toward the end of the previous song. “Lotus” opens with grandiose keyboards and driving beats quickly met with querulous vocal harmonies ushering in another dancefloor smasher. The vocals require no adornment, and there’s a warm, reassuring familiarity to them, an intimate quality that expertly complements the tight musical compositions. There’s a sense of maturity in this, too. They retain that uniquely low, grating quality immediately recognizable as his but lack the machine-effected menace which characterized some of Project Pitchfork’s best-known songs. The music’s maturity – its ability to depart from past sounds and to produce new material that doesn’t merely echo the old – is equally evident in Scheuber’s vocals. “Cosmic Voids” launches with even heavier beats and swirling synth lines vocals erupt from the outset it’s a dancefloor smasher par excellence. Here he shows us not what he can do but what he wants to do, crafting songs that are beautiful in form, intelligent in lyrical content, and all still eminently danceable. He’s been there, done that there’s something more artful, even playful, about Autarcique. Scheuber could launch us into the dance-floor climaxes of a Project Pitchfork stomper but doesn’t need to. Scheuber’s solo work echoes the song patterns of his other group – slow starts rising into grandiose, synth-lined big beat crescendos – but there’s a sense of clever restraint here, a minimalism that’s more a sign of maturity than anything. It’s a fitting opener, an amuse-bouche that gets the muscles twitching for the dancefloor but conveys a sense of restrained energy: the best is yet to come. “3am” opens Autarcique with pianos, percussion gradually sliding in, followed by a gentle synth backing. In his solo work, Scheuber keeps his finger on the tap of what’s current, prodding his music to newer, faster, more expansively creative levels. The delicate balance between the new and the familiar helps listeners grow along with the musicians and is one of the elements I appreciated about bands with outputs as prodigious as Project Pitchfork. The new material is exciting and different, but it won’t leave fans with a sense of abandonment. ![]() One of the marks of both projects is a tendency toward steady, reliable growth neither slipping into the trap of repeating past successes such that they become monotonous nor jumping into new styles so erratically as to leave their fans behind. There’s probably never been a bad Project Pitchfork album or a poor Scheuber release. ![]() As fans might have hoped, it’s a masterpiece of synthpop songwriting. Scheuber’s been producing solo material since at least 2016, and Autarcique marks his fifth studio album. The record manifests this quality expertly, offering a delicately constructed balance between his Project Pitchfork roots and his solo capacity to push past those limits, to explore and define a sound just for himself, a finely wrought equilibrium that refines and showcases the innate creative qualities he brought to his other musical projects. It’s a fitting title for a solo album from an artist who is still often associated with his longer-running former band. Scheuber left the band in 2020 to focus on his work, which has proven no less delightful.Īutarcique – autarky – a term from political philosophy denoting a quality of self-sufficiency. Hailing from Hamburg, Germany, Project Pitchfork have 18 studio albums under their belt and have produced countless dancefloor classics. Scheuber is the eponymous solo project of Dirk Scheuber, co-founder and former keyboardist with Project Pitchfork, a group tearing up dark electronic dancefloors since 1990. After teasing fans with a handful of singles, Scheuber’s latest full-length Autarcique reveals precisely what those previews hinted at: a superb synthwave album infused with equal parts dark dance beats and fine song-crafting.
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