Hearts Revolution – Choose Your Own Adventure

Expressed as a Venn Diagram, you’d expect the crossover between “ice-cream sellers” and “splenetic electro-punk duos” to be fairly slender, so it’s to Hearts Revolution boundless credit that they fulfil both roles.

Initially setting themselves up as a kind of Mr Whippy-for-hipsters, New Yorkers Ben And Lo would park their customised ice-cream van outside suitably trendy nightspots, dispensing T-shirts, electro-clash mix-tapes, and, one likes to speculate, 99 Flakes laced with MDMA.

One lightbulb-in-the-brain later and they realised they could convert the goodwill towards them amongst clubbers into a ready-made market for their own tunes.

Their first single, anti-war glitch-fest Choose Your Own Adventure, appeared last year on a split 7" with fellow robo-rockers Crystal Castles, a band with whom they have much in common, not least the fact that they are a boy/girl duo who prefer not to show their faces in press shots (although, predictably, without the masks they actually look like American Apparel models).

Hearts Revolution recall Crystal Castles in other ways, namely the way in which they yoke together two abrasive sounds – volcanic electro on the one hand, distorted Karen O vocals on the other – yet manage to create a sound that’s weirdly epic, shot through with a nameless dread. “We’re all just lost, don’t know which way to go/You say you want revolution/I want to know why,” yowls vocalist Lo over a brittle circuit-board of bleeps and one-note guitar-riffs.

But this is not simply modish, Vice Magazine nihilism. More than that, it’s hedonism with an edge of desperation to it, vocal cords tearing and synths surging as though simultaneously in defiance of, yet terrified by, the abyssal comedown to come.

[MP3 hosted here]

[Hearts Revolution]