Loveshadow, that’s Anya Dross and Izaak S. With »II« they search for the past between 1980s dance floor sweat and multi-coloured roller skates. The San Francisco duo met in a Boston coffee shop a few years ago, where they discovered their mutual love of 1980s music through an Aurra track. So much for the urban legend. Now Anya Dross and Izaak S have followed up their debut album »Loveshadow« with »II«, their second tribute to the era that spanned Italo disco and synth wave, and one which is sure to appeal to all neo-nostalgics. On »Last Room« Dross is soft on the synths, while on »Earthen Track« she applies her timbre to the Kate Bush-like scale. On »Another Dream« things get almost spooky, which may have something to do with the lyrical work of Anna Dross: The lyrics remain trapped in the unreality of dreams, transforming the synths that underlie them into bearers of a surreal future. This way, Loveshadow aim to »blur the boundaries between past and present, pop and avant-garde, the immanent and the transcendent«. Whether they will succeed is an open question, unless today’s disco fans join forces with yesterday’s post-modern hippies that is. But that wouldn’t be such a bad thing: they’d probably have a good time listening to »II« anyway.

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