Plus Instruments
Trancesonics
Last year saw a small revival of Ultra - the Dutch version of post-punk (in 2 words). You'd better browse back to Vital Weekly 822 and read more. It brought back a lot of happy memories and old musicians, but it seems that the one artist who benefitted most was Truus de Groot. Once a member of Nasmak, then Plus Instruments (in a first incarnation with Lee Ranaldo and David Linton). Just before the revival started she released a great CD 'Dance With Me', of all new songs, which showed she still had the same great charm as she had thirty years ago. It brought her a retrospective album on Vinyl On Demand (which sadly didn't make it to these pages) and concerts in The Netherlands and France. Plus of course new work, and here's another album of twelve new songs. 'Dance With Me' was great, but this new one is even better. More coherent altogether, variations on what Truus does. And what's that, you may ask? Truus de Groot plays her crackle box, synthesizers, rhythm machines and sings. She does that with great style. The music is pretty much straight forward, sequenced rhythms, to which she bends her voice to sing songs. Not moan, howl, whisper, but actually singing great songs. Her crackle box functions as machine to create weird songs that float around her strict beats. Music that reminds you of DAF at their peak, but less macho, more feminine and, perhaps, listening to sweat ditty as 'Magic Carpet', also a bit more hippy like. That whole thing makes this something which is something that surely some people will like, who found DAF a bit too pathetic, too German. It still sounds like 1982, but then updated and way more poppy. 'Detour Square Dance' is her version of 'Der Mussolini' and should be an underground dance classic. Excellent!