Description
Pieter Van Dessel is not one to stand still when it comes to music: the driving force behind Marble Sounds keeps challenging himself, exploring new horizons on every album. After the more melancholic eponymous fifth album, synths and drums take center stage for a pure and almost electronic pop sound on sixth effort ‘Core Memory’.
“I felt that with the previous record I’d reached a point where it was hard to do better”, Van Dessel says of the widely acclaimed ‘Marble Sounds’ (2022), blending indie pop with neoclassical music and electronica, while singles like ‘Quiet’ and ‘Axolotl’ conquered radio and alternative charts. “Instead of trying to top that album, I made a different one, with more clean-cut pop songs and choruses. The previous album aimed for the heart, this one goes for a gut feeling, containing several references to my childhood’s music memories, especially from the 80s.”
The result is sparkling and epic indie pop, often with driving synths and delicious melodies, like on opening track and first single An Emotional High, or If You Would Prove Me Wrong Now, which did very well in The Netherlands too: Marble Sounds made the cover of Spotify's leading ‘New Alternative’ playlist and played a live session for popular NPO Radio 2 show Blokhuis. Third single Give Or Take A Few is Van Dessel's answer to A Thousand Miles, Vanessa Carlton's smash hit from the beginning of this millennium. “And your thousand miles, I'd walk ’em too”, he sings in a touching ballad reminiscent of Eels and Tom Waits.
Halfway through the album, Van Dessel pulls out all the (synth) stops on Not All Is In Vain, a key track boasting a Moroder vibe and a chorus shifting to a phenomenal outro and fade-out, a musical theme reprised on jubilant closing track A Place To Call Mine. Tracks like Catch It Alive, Nothing To Get Over and Hear Me Talking once again prove that writing a Perfect Pop Song comes naturally to Van Dessel, while the organ on Said So will give you chills, and Keep This Air Inside Of Me sounds like a lost gem by Gorillaz.
Van Dessel didn’t have to look far for the title of the album. “I saw it in my bookcase one day. There’s a book called ‘Core Memory’, a collection of postcards with photos by Mark Richard of computers from the Computer History Museum. It instantly made perfect sense for me. Core Memory, the memory of the first computers. It’s vintage futuristic.” The same can be said of the fantastic artwork by the multi-talented Elke Verschatse, who previously worked for the band Goose, several film and TV productions and even fashion icon Dries Van Noten. Her minimalist and colourful design fits the album and music like a glove.
Like with previous Marble Sounds records, Core Memory was produced by Van Dessel himself. It’s out on 7 March, followed by a release tour in Belgium and The Netherlands, playing lovely venues from Antwerp to Bruges and Utrecht to Maastricht.
