The album Warszawa by Superfamily must be a decade old by now, and it’s not a record I’ve ever read a review of or heard anyone talk about, maybe I talked about it in the posts that went into to Papierkorb. Who knows? Fuck knows. One of the specific things I love about this record is its time travel theme. The first track is even called ‚Time Travelling‘. But you can’t make out the lyrics to that one too well as the vox are vocodered, presumably garbled during their journey through space-time.
A quick digression: if you listen to Kraftwerk’s Computer World (the title track from that LP) very closely, the lyric goes:
Interpol and Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard
Interpol and Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard
Crime, travel, communication, entertainment
Crime, travel, communication, entertainment
Then it goes like this:
Interpol and Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard
Interpol and Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard
Time travel, communication, entertainment
Time travel, communication, entertainment
And music is the perfect medium for time travellers. Kraftwerk knew this. Superfamily must have too. Anyway the other thing I love about Warszawa is that it doesn’t obscure its influences. You can hear the influence of The Killers in particular. But rather than this producing a simulacral effect, the opposite happens: the artist is free. A simulacrum is only a simulacrum if it’s unknowing or cynical. Originality is what it is, but the guarding of originality is unoriginal, as is is its curation. Warszawa is a record of its time, despite the time travel. (Tourbillon and on and on, Mireia, wherever u are.)
And then there’s a twist. A perfect denouement. The Suffering (the closing track) shifts from The Killers suddenly, gloriously, to a Daniel Lanois influence worn on its sleeve so vividly that it could be a sleeve tattoo. It’s there in the vocal presentation, the metre and the whatever the word is I’m looking for here – saudade? Eraritjaritjaka? Ghostiness? The song breaks down like this – central character heads to the city centre on a Saturday night but leaves at 8pm cos there’s „nothing new“, heads along a „sandy street“ (James Joyce reference?) to home. „First I froze and then I turned the key“. Vocoder kicks in again. For like 6 minutes. Night turns to day. The protagonist then gives us a precis of what just happened: he went home but she was gone, the lights still on in the house. And now it’s morning in a day that’s „young, grey and gold“. A big ending. No time travel though, as the closing words of the song and the LP go like this:
It’s a sin to go back in time. Move it on move it on, move it on, move it on
Then you realise this is an urge to time travel to the future, and it is why the song is fucking genius. Because living day to day is that forward movement. There is no exit. The future is that mountain.
