Norken

It’s hard not to chuckle when a Brit writes an album called Our Memories of Winter. Really, what are they complaining about? Any winter without snow shouldn’t even qualify as winter. At the very melodic end of the dance music spectrum — up there with Funk D’Void — Norken is where progressive house got tired of being big and went minimal and ended up sounding a hell of a lot like melodic techno. On one hand, there is quite a lot of reverb and delay-heavy twiddling synths — yawn — but luckily there is also some melodic sense at work here, which marks it a notch above most of what comes out in this vein. It seems a touch long, and there are no clear standout singles, but then there are no tracks to skip either, and that’s a far more rare quality.