PROVISION VISUALIZE ALBUM A DIFFERENT DRUM RELEASE: SEPTEMBER, 2004 REVIEW: OCTOBER 11, 2004

Being born in the late seventies has caused me some serious retroactive pain, mostly in the form of massive economic setbacks. I have had to track down heaps of early-to-mid eighties releases and paid way too much for quite a few of them. Luckily my interest in electronic pop music started in time to grab some of the rare, but classic, late-eightites-to-early-nineties synthpop releases. Bands like Celebrate the Nun, Moskwa TV, Red Flag, Cetu Javu and the reincarnated Boytronic more or less became the soundtrack to my childhood days, albeit accompanied by some lingering Italo Disco.
Provision takes me back to those care free days of playing football (soccer!) at my parents' summer house, the stereo blasting out "Tekno Talk" or "Have in Mind" in the blistering heat. "Visualize" picks up this somewhat forgotten vein of the synthpop genre and does so with passion and integrity. Much more refined than its predecessor (the self-released "Evaporate"), this album gives us delightful melodies and straight-up pop songs, heavily relying on bouncing synths and skittering snare drums. The borderline "traditional" vocal may bug some listeners, but it works well in these machine constructed surroundings. Some production issues and a few uninspired efforts can not hold back Provision's impressively improving knack for churning out catchy semi-retro synthpop.

NIKLAS FORSBERG