Pitchfork
November 16, 2009
Link
8 ("Best New Music")
"It's not a question of understanding it, man. If you feel it, you feel it, stupid." That's a male voice talking on the title track from the Tough Alliance's second proper album, 2007's A New Chance. And, at the risk of thinking when we should be feeling, I'm pretty sure those words get right to heart of what makes this Swedish duo's recordings so enduring. As with that quote, TTA's music is simple and emphatic-- a kid could "understand" it, as if that were the point-- but at the same time, there's something aggressive about that clarity, the shiny electropop hooks and the innocently cynical (or is that cynically innocent?) Top 40 emotion. You could follow the trail of references here back to John Cassavetes (the source of the sample), but you'd be missing the point. "If you feel it, you feel it."
TTA aren't the kind of band that makes portentous-sounding eight-minute epics. "A New Chance", at 4:34, is the longest track on the album of the same name, alongside eight other short, melodic, should-be worldwide hits. So it's a good thing Six Finger Satellite guitarist John MacLean, better known as DFA electronic artist the Juan MacLean, remixed "A New Chance" for a 2008 digital-only EP that's only now seeing the light of Klicktrack. You can hear the Cassavetes quote a little more clearly, but what this house-y remix really does best is put the original song up on a gleaming, hi-fidelity pedestal of piano and percussion and synth arpeggios, to be admired as well as felt. "I know a place where diamonds never fade away," TTA sing, and we're there, and MacLean gives it all a museum-worthy, disco-worthy frame. If you felt like you never understood these guys before, any day's a new chance. Don't fight it, stupid, feel it.
