Fischerspooner’s new album SIR is a brooding reflection on sexual liaisons, desire and frustration. Some of the lyrics hint at memories and experiences from a trip to South America. The music is at the crossroads between trance, 80s pop music and beatsy dance music. But this is not straightforward ‘enjoy the sunshine’ pop, trance or dance. Its a tense musical backcloth, to go with the avarice, condescension and hurt in the lyrics. There are several wonderful musical flourishes throughout the album. There’s awesome keyboards, sometimes harking back to Depeche Mode, sometimes more contemporary. These are often combined with great harmonising. There’s a variety of extraordinary electronic sounds and sprinkles and a multiplicity of electronic modifications made to the vocals, helping them reach inhuman highs and lows. The vocal modifications help keep things fresh, keep the listener perky, given that the vocals of Casey Spooner whilst full of desire and attitude, don’t have a great range, they’re a little flat, he’s like a Bono with limitations. Another extraordinary feature of the album is Fischerspooner’s adeptness in contorting the English language, in riffing off syllables, in emphasising and making unexpected motifs out of mundane phrases. More than anything, this is a highly sexual and very sticky album. In some ways its a bid to capture some kind of sexual zeitgeist, maybe a Californian one, maybe a personal one, certainly a gay one and maybe a mythical one.