Bustié
Throb
self-titled
The combination of sounds and styles Angelika Padilla brings to bear on her Bustié project has been in place at least since 2019’s Birds Of Paradise LP and has remained distinctly tied to her work despite the ebbs and flows of dark club trends in the interim. That’s because, frankly, there isn’t anyone else with the audacity to combine deathrock, body music, and latin freestyle, let alone the panache to pull it off. With her own distinct vibe on lock, then, Padilla’s clearly spent the last few years finding new and subtler ways of blurring the lines between each of her influences, not to mention crafting some of the sexiest club tracks this scene has heard in years.
If you’re new to Bustié, the flurry of sounds marshalled by Padilla on Throb‘s opening salvo of tracks is likely to be intoxicating and befuddling. The swing and bounce of opener “Perimeters Of Love”‘s bassline hits like the bastard child of Nitzer Ebb’s “Lightning Man” and Janet’s “Rhythm Nation”, while the pivot between the skittering EBM of “Negative Approach” and the way clave rhythms are laid atop murky deathrock harmonics on the murderously thick “Cruel Intentions” would be neck-snapping if all of those distinct styles hadn’t been blended and shaded so expertly. More personality and variety is crammed into the opening 12 minutes of Throb than most acts can muster in their career, and you’d have to wind the clock back to High-Functioning Flesh’s landmark Definite Structures to find an American body music record with this many pure jams in it (and we haven’t even mentioned the record-setting ‘orch hits per minute’ ratio the record achieves).
Craft and memorability of tunes aside, Throb also serves as a rock-solid platform for Padilla’s presence and charisma as a frontwoman. Pulling Rozz Williams’ tortured camp into the queer future, she hisses and seethes her way through moments of lust, spite, magic, lust, betrayal, lust, and more lust. You’re not going to hear a hornier EBM record this year, and frankly Padilla’s ‘come hither before I cast ye away’ excess is a welcome change from the way sexuality’s been sublimated into faux-noir cryptic mumbling in so much electro-darkwave of late.
If one really wanted to squint at Throb to try to find a fault with it, a case could be made that the track sequencing places the more stripped-down and singularly focused tracks on the B-side in comparison to the more sprawling A-side, but there’s also real interest in hearing distillations of mutant EBM on “Confess” and pure goth invective on “Bubastis” after having those elements blended together earlier, and that sort of petty nit-picking isn’t going to be on your mind as Throb invariably begins to work its way into the cooler house parties and hotter club nights you’ll find yourself at this summer. One of the most refreshing and intoxicating records of body music of this year or any other. Highly recommended.
