Games of the XXI Olympiad

There’s a lot to absorb in Black Cab’s album-length rumination on 1970s East German athletics, says ANDREW P STREET.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] When an electronic band makes an album with an international sports theme, it’s pretty much impossible not to think Kraftwerk. It’s a somewhat appropriate touchstone in other ways too: this is a concept album based around the 1976 Olympics, held in Montreal back in the days when steroid doping counted as a training regime.

The USSR and East Germany swept the gold medal tally that year thanks to a comprehensive programme of doping athletes with anabolic steroids, with every gold medal seen as an ideological win for Communism – if, as the post-unification lawsuits demonstrated, a significant biomedical loss for the athletes themselves.

There’s been a five year gap between this and the last Black Cab album, 2009’s Call Signs, an album similarly concerned with East German history. It’s by far the most electronic album they’ve done yet, but what’s most surprising is that it hangs together as a single piece despite multiple sessions with different producers, including Woody Annison, Simon Polinski and Tim “Death in Vegas” Holmes. Some of the tracks have already seen the light of day, but 2011’s upbeat ‘Combat Boots’ and the dark pulse of 2010 single ‘Sexy Polizei’ sit perfectly alongside more recent material.

“Anyone looking for a soundtrack to their horror film should definitely start here.”

The album starts with the sample-heavy ‘Opening Ceremony’ before launching into the epic 10=minute ‘Supermädchen’, whose relentless pulse and vocoder is a spiritual successor to the deeper cuts of Tour de France Soundtracks (especially ‘Titanium’, which would have benefitted greatly from Black Cab’s richer bass). It’s a perfect intro to ‘Victorious’, where shuffling percussion is corralled into place by a pitiless bass sequence, overlaid by Andrew Coates declaring “I am victorious” in a tone as hollow as the victory it’s celebrating.

It’s followed by the claustrophobic ‘Performance Center Obertauern’, where overlapping lines of James Lee’s EBow are punctuated by static gurgles. Anyone looking for a soundtrack to their horror film should definitely start either here or with the haunting instrumental ‘State Plan 1425’, the official name of the East German government’s almost-30-year programme of drugging their largely unaware athletes. They contrast beautifully with ‘Kornelia Ender’, a tribute to the multiple record-breaking teenage swimming star. “I am fast/I am beautiful/I am now a modern girl/with the will to win,” it goes, over a hi-NRG bed that wouldn’t be out of place on a Pet Shop Boys single.

“This needs to be listened to from start to finish.”

However, the highlight comes at the midpoint with ‘Go Slow’, where a jubilant house beat and live bass are undercut by Coates’ mournful, distorted vocal. Although this is unquestionably an electronic album, lovers of the classic Cab sound are served with the (comparatively) guitar-heavy ‘Problem Child’. The album closes on the ethereal ‘Closing Ceremony’, with Coates intoning “Goin’ all the way” over a bed of imperious synths, with sun breaking though in the form of a sudden flurry of organ noodling.

If there’s a criticism to be made – and it’s not so much a criticism as a description – this is an album that needs to be listened to from start to finish. The more atmospheric moments work superbly well in context, but are going to sound formless and odd turning up on shuffle. It might have taken half a decade to get here, but with Games of the XXI Olympiad, Black Cab have created a masterpiece. Make the most of it too – the next Cab might be a while coming.

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‘Games of the XXI Olympiad’ is out now through Interstate 40 Music/Remote Control. Black Cab launch the album Saturday, November 29 at Howler in Melbourne with Lowtide and Queens Head. More info here.