EP Review: Creatures of Love – Boy Crimes

If someone walked up to us and said, ‘I listen to Chillwave’, we wouldn’t know what the hell they’d be chatting about. This excellent EP from Creatures of Love, however, is all the education we need.

With achingly beautiful vocals throughout, this EP is a tremendous exploration of the kind of ways that electro music can go – it doesn’t all have to be party-dance classic, but can be more chilled and haunting.

If we are going to talk ‘haunting’ however, the EP’s opening track ‘Knossus’ is possibly the best to discuss. With an Enya-gone-evil quality to it, it has a proper electro edge, but reminds us of the bad side of taking drugs. With machine-like sounds, the vocalist (Bonita) sounds like a female version of one of the singers for Hercules and Love Affair.

‘Evil’ is probably the best way to describe the track ‘Sutra Sweet’, as it is reminiscent of the final boss battle against a female villain in a video game. Sexy, sultry and dark, one clever sausage asked if it was about bareback sex on the Soundcloud page. We don’t know if that is the case, but the female moans towards the end suggest that. Regardless, this is the kind of track you can have sex to.

You would be forgiven for thinking that ‘Voyeurs’ would have more to do with sex, but it has beautifully discordant vocals that kind of bounce around until the fit about half way through the song. None of this is bad, by the way, it’s just unusual – possibly the best way to describe Creature of Love themselves.

The closing track, ‘Vakkula’, has already been released as a single and has a kind of waking-up-from-a-dream idea about it. The camera shutter sounds are a little off-putting but by the time that turns to irritation it is replaced with a pulse sound which is very pleasant.

The only non-vocal track, ‘IV’, is a smart sounding piece of music that sounds like the kind of thing you would hear in a film or on a game when the main character has just had a cognitive click and suddenly knows how to defeat the evil baddie. It is gorgeous and metronomic.

Overall, we love the rules that this EP breaks – ‘gothic’, is the term that has been used to describe this music most, which literally means unconventional and unusual and is usually applied to rock and metal, which needn’t be the case. We congratulate the Creatures of Love and look forward to a longer album version of Boy Crimes.

You can download the EP from their Bandcamp page.