Bart Constant – Tell Yourself Whatever You Have To

Could the Maya’s have been right? Are major changes coming to the world in 2012? It certainly seems so, what else can explain the fact that the best releases in the first weeks of the new year are not from the US, not from the UK, no not even from Canada (sorry guys) or Belgium, but from the normally barren musical grounds of the Netherlands. First Blaudzun released his brilliant third album and now Amsterdam’s Bart Constant puts out a remarkable record by national and international standards. At least three more Dutch releases are on my gramophone, cd player and I-thingy, waiting to be praised on the Fuzz. What’s going on in the low country?

Bart Constant is Rutger Hoedemaekers. Until Hoedemaekers went to Berlin five years ago, to broaden his artistic horizon, he released a critically acclaimed album under the name About. Bongo (2006) combined electro and math-rock with elements classical music and house. If usually Berlin inspires musicians to adapt fatter beats and more obscure electronic landscapes, it somehow had the opposite effect on Hoedemaekers. There’s nothing underground about Tell Yourself Whatever You Have To. The album uniquely mixes baroque pop á la Andrew Bird, Beirut and Parenthical Girls with bits of electro. It’s a clever album, but not showy.

 The arrangements on Tell Yourself Whatever You Have To are dense and grandiose. They help build up expectation and suspense in almost every song. And just when you think that Hoedemaekers is going over the top, like halfway through the bombastic Seven-Minute Revolution, he tones down with a quiet middle eight. The album as a whole is nicely balanced as well, with the more densely instrumented and uptempo songs in the beginning and the end of the album, broken by a tranquil intermezzo of piano driven ballad’s like the song Do Better (Animals Make Me Angry), written with the American pianist and composer Dustin O’Halloran.

What strikes me about Tell Yourself Whatever You Have to is that, whilst its fierce and exciting percussion is a defining feature, the actual drum sound is rather conventional and dated. Somehow it works. Just like Hoedemaeker’s typical singing voice, reminding me of Roger Hogdson, could easily become irritating, but doesn’t. It must have been the many years of working on the details of this album that leaves little to chance, without becoming too polished.

‘The Dutch don’t do electropop’ I concluded a year ago, after I had failed to be impressed by the accuracy of what critics wrote about Lola Kite. Tell Yourself Whatever You Have To too is not electropop, it’s much more. It’s an album that makes me proud to be an Amsterdammer, even though it was recorded five cities in two continents and mastered at Abbey Road. I don’t know what the Maya’s predicted about Bart Constant, but I foretell that 2012 could well see him make an international breakthrough.