Event: Tosca at Mezzanine, Tue, Dec 10 9:00p

[clubmaster]

Feat. Cath Coffey & Robert Gallagher on vocals It’s their sixth album now out in 2013 and believe me, it is even stronger and more sophisticated than the last – No Hassle. If geography has an impact on music, then Vienna has coloured Tosca’s music at every turn. Over the course of a career spanning two decades, the Austrian capital has inspired Richard Dorfmeister (of Kruder & Dorfmeister fame) and Rupert Huber to make electronic mood pieces coloured with Middle European melancholy. It’s a bittersweet coexistence that is much in evidence on the pair’s new album, Odeon. It opens with the hazy strings of Zur Guten, which ebbs into the oozing keys and pizzicato steel string guitars of What If, which features a smokey vocal from Sarah Callier. Lead single Jayjay is a haunted combination of sombre piano chords, rolling drums and weird, otherworldly vocals from Jay Jay Jones. It’s the pivotal track on a record that sees Tosca tapping into gothic atmospheres. It’s darker than their previous five albums, more downbeat, at times ambient. It’s unlike anything else out there at the moment. Listening to a track like Meixner Nu Y you have to go back to the ’80s and The The for a reference point. It’s truly peerless stuff.