Bassvictim's PEACE + WAR Doubles Down and Loses the Plot

Bassvictim's new album PEACE + WAR nearly doubles the runtime of last year's Forever, and much of that extra time goes nowhere. The duo — Polish vocalist Maria Manow and producer Ike Clateman — built their name on compact, high-impact electronic songwriting. This record stretches the formula until it thins.

The review under review, a track-by-track fan assessment, calls Bassvictim's music some of the decade's tightest knot-in-my-chest material. Forever, recorded in, as the writer puts it, "buttfuck Norway," delivered 11 gorgeous, gutsy, scab-picking laptop symphonies. PEACE + WAR retreads that feeling "without exactly knowing where it'll end up."

What worked on Forever?

Forever earned instant-classic status, per the reviewer, on one strength: swells and comedowns that were huge and momentous, with not a second wasted. Clateman's production inflated everything cartoonishly. Synthesizers sounded like huge brass sections, piano runs like dancing on daisies, and 808s (the Roland drum machine that defines trap and modern pop low-end) left mushroom clouds.

Manow's writing carries the emotional load. The reviewer praises her knack for whittling down towers of intrapersonal complexity into simple declarations, shouting lines like "I want the good weather/I wanna take my clothes off" — a flash of the brightest memories from the most turbulent summer of your life. The duo sits somewhere between the tear-jerking saudade of Alex G and the high-octane finagling of M.I.A., channeling myopic twentysomethings mending old wounds and opening new ones.

Where does PEACE + WAR go wrong?

Mostly, it stalls on the runway. Tracks get stuck in a state of lift-off, building toward crests that never arrive. The failures are specific:

• "Charred Glass" and "No. 33 piano" meander as edgeless instrumentals without pay-off.
• "7," a collaboration with Fimiguerrero, sounds like two demos on the same beat spliced together.
• "Wake Up" and "Who Told You" trip over constantly moving parts, atonal melodies and choppy, unsettled drumbeats.

Even the highlights carry the same restlessness. The reviewer wishes the childlike "la la la"s at the heart of "Girl Wars" and the salvific DJ E guitars and stomps of "War Song" had more space to breathe. The material is there. The room isn't.

So what?

PEACE + WAR confirms the duo's gifts while testing the listener's patience with them. The verdict lands as a shrug with affection in it: the follow-up wants Forever's scale but forgets what made the debut hit — momentum that actually pays off. Whether Bassvictim's next move tightens the screws again will tell us if Forever was the blueprint or the accident.