2003 CD
People have described Retconned as: alienating, sounding foreign, "like walking in on your parents while they are having sex", "like putting a drill to your head", and sounding like a distorted version of the song 'She Bop', by Cyndi Lauper. This is all bullshit. Retconned writes pop songs.
Retconned, fka Jonathan Lukens, began his erratic career as an angry, mildly neurasthenic pop-cultural footnote in Atlanta, GA, USA, in the mid-90s. Lukens fronted a few DIY post-punk bands influenced by the cultivated positivism of The Nation of Ulysses and Huggy Bear and the somber musical interplay of bands such as Joy Division, Honor Role, Moss Icon, and Unwound. The most notable of these was Year Zero, a phrenetic quartet with somber hooks and rhythmic, building dirges that was welcomed by the disenchanted kids of the American Southeast and by a whole lot of bad luck. After Year Zero's break-up, Lukens began working with sampler and sequencer. While he had no real love of the electronic music of the time, band members were hard to come by, and the sounds he was looking to produce had no real analogs in the world of guitar, bass, drums. Lukens named this new band Retconned, which is science fiction jargon for retroactive continuity. Retconned played its first show on New Year's Eve of 1997 to a somewhat baffled crowd that mistakenly expected the same-old post-hardcore punk.
The title of Retconned’s newest release, Game Sounds, appears to be some malformed pun on The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. It's hard to determine if "game" is meant to signify a video game, a hunter's prey, or both. Aurally, we have a beautifully catchy pop album that combines a post-punk aesthetic, general snottiness, elements of 80s synth-pop and electro, and highly dissonant and distorted synthetic textures. Lyrically, we have what appears to be some sort of everyman commentary on the relationship between globalization, pop music, surveillance, making babies, communication technologies, dirty tricks, and day-to-day life.
Recorded during the summer of 2003.
MP3 Sample: Postcard
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