CD: SP0642
RELEASED: 2004
LABEL: SubPop

01. Dead Wrong
02. Fashion Death Trends
03. The Extremists
04. Soft Light
05. A Go-See
06. Broken Arrows
07. Current Bedding
08. The Man Who Dreaded Sundown
09. Contact
10. Tomorrow's Sky

Fashion is fickle. One day it's safe to forget about 1980s icons like the Cure, New Order and Echo and the Bunnymen; the next, you find that hot young bands are pulling their records out of the bins, slapping them on the stereo and going from there. Now Brent Rademaker brings on Frausdots, who join the Rapture, Radio Berlin, Interpol and maybe 50 other bands in mining that dark, echoey Reagan-era vibe. Frausdots was born, apparently, when Rademaker and Michelle Loiselle (the bass player and Rademaker's girlfriend) travelled to Spain together and saw the Cure at a festival. They recruited The Cure's keyboardist Roger O'Donnel to guest on the album. Couture, Couture, Couture itself draws heavily from Disintegration-era Cure music, dramatic synthy gestures joined to affecting love songs. There's also a fair bit of similarity in the drumming, thundering tribally under the superclean vocals. So, obviously, the main reference is The Cure, though you can hear nods to other late-1980s bands -- the swirling euphoria of Echo and the Bunnymen, the reverbed romanticism of the Psychedelic Furs, and even the epic emptiness of Simple Minds.

Influences / Similar Artists:
The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, Simple Minds