Studio: West Coast

A Swedish duo whose generic name feels like a pointed aesthetic choice, Studio plays and/or makes warm, atmospheric songs that waver between rhythmic post-punk and Balearic disco. Whether they "play" or "make" such songs proves intriguingly hard to divine: The pizzicato guitars and fleshy bass-walks in "Out There" evoke the image of two guys plugging necked instruments straight into a mixing board, but the space surrounding metronomic beats—not to mention the 15-minute running time—suggests a duo devoted to the swish and glide of vintage electronic dance music. Vocal songs such as "West Side" tip toward The Cure in a relaxed, expansive mood, but West Coast sounds more grounded in the arpeggiated synths and fractured dub effects of drawn-out digressions like "Life's A Beach." It's a timely sound whose sense of time drifts toward obscure corners of the '70s and '80s that still hold out lots of space for exploration.