The music world waits a decade for more music from Marc Nguyen Tan AKA Colder – and then along come two albums at once. As Colder, Marc released two acclaimed, cult darkwave, post-punk albums on Trevor Jackson’s taste-making Output Recordings in the mid 00s (‘Again’ in ’03 and ‘Heat’ in ’05). After the closure of Output, Marc spent the last few years playing and recording improvised jazz in the mountains of Spain. Then in 2015 he released the third Colder album ‘Many Colours’, after a decade of musical silence. His new musical vehicle is SAVE! and their record ‘Monsters and Fairies’. On this one he steps aside as vocalist and collaborates with American poet and singer Craig Louis Higgins Jr. Last year Craig contributed his unsettling spoken word to the acclaimed dub-acid trax by Paranoid London (recording under his Mutado Pintado moniker). The world they have created together, with Craig recording in London and Marc in Spain, exists in a dream, suspended between the two locations. A creeping, creepy Lynchian-world, where acid-dub work-outs combine with stream-of-consciousness monologues to make one of the strangest records this side of Serge Gainsbourg’s reggae albums like ‘Aux Armes et cætera’. The record warps and shimmers as if seen through a heat haze, a confused existential daydream or a dark wave mirage. SAVE! finds Marc operating in the experimental shadows, against the grain, much as Colder’s post-punk sound originally appeared in the context of the other dance music in 2003.

Collaboration between Marc Nguyen Tan (Colder) and American vocalist Craig Louis Higgins Jr. Unsettling street poetics meets strained synth-funk arrangements...reminiscent of Alan Vega, Lost Animal and classic Compass Point production. Great record!

By Adam