Alternative Press
CMJ
De:Bug (German or English)
Ear Pollution
Eye
Motion
Urban Sounds
Vital
Solvent's Mom

Alternative Press (USA)
An intricately crafted yet playful release, Solvently One Listens takes its cues from electro-pop's hey-day, when eyeliner and Soft Cell were all the rage. However, Solvent (aka Jason Amm) has an uncanny knack for combining the lo-fi rhythms of his heros with the serpentine beats and clicks in current vogue. Much of this release possesses a childlike quality lacking in a genre obsessed with complexity. Solvent keeps things short and sweet, which is a rarity in electronica today. There's nothing especially groundbreaking about Solvently One Listens, but I haven't been able to get Solvent's sacharine melodies out of my head for weeks.

Bill Cohen

CMJ (Canada)
New Music Report. Issue 644: November 23, 1999
Jason Amm's (aka Solvent) adoration for bubbly techno-pop is apparent on his second full-length, Solvently One Listens. Using ancient analog machinery to compose dense, robotic lullabies, Amm emits early-'80s vibes with a 21st century outlook. The album is alternately jubilant and restrained, yet consistently soothing throughout, often suggesting early Depeche Mode as interpreted by Autechre.

M. Tye Comer

De:Bug (Germany)
'Hello Pop' heisst einer der Tracks, und mir fällt kein besseres Motto für dieses brachial gute Album ein. Jason Amm macht reinen Tisch, sitzt auf seiner Dachterasse und pfeift einen Hit nach dem nächsten. Die Rhythmussektion des kleinen Solventorchesters rumpelt und stolpert triolisch über herumliegende Synchronisationskabel, und das Melodiekollektiv hat sich für dieses Projekt mindestens sechs Monate in Klausur zurückgezogen und dabei viel und intensiv über die Faszination der Oktavmelodien nachgedacht. Tür auf und willkommen in Solvent City, einer Stadt, in der Musiker dazu verdonnert werden solche Fliegen wie Dave Gahan 1982 zu tragen, als er damit noch bei den Mädchen ankam. Alles hübsch bunt hier, analoge Keyboards sind spottbillig, Cocktails haben grelle Farben, und letztendlich sitzen alle auf den Bürgersteigen, schlürfen Getränke und diskutieren neue Soundeinstellungen. Klar, dass es hier keine Gewalt gibt, und das alle ihre Syhnthies gerne mal verleihen. Es ist eine gute Welt, in der Solvent lebt, und das hört man der Platte an. 5/5

Thaddi Herrmann

De:Bug (Germany)
'Hello Pop' one of the tracks is called, and I couldn't think of a better slogan for this beserk good album. Jason Amm clears the table, sits on his terrace and whistles one hit after another. The rhythmsection of the small Solvent orchestra rumbles and stumbles over triplets, spitting sync-cables, and the melody collective took a six months' break to think about and discuss a fascination for octave melodies. Open the door and welcome to Solvent City, a town in which musicians have to wear bow-ties like Dave Gahan did in 1982 - a time when he could impress girls with it. Everything is really colorful here, analogue keyboards are really cheap, the cocktails have bright colours and everybody is sitting on the pavement, sipping drinks and discussing new sounds. Of course, there is no violence everybody lends each other their synths. It is a good world Solvent lives in. You can hear that. 5/5

Thaddi Herrmann

Ear Pollution (Canada)
Issue 1.11: November 1999
I'm going to create a new genre. It's terribly indulgent of me, but I've come to understand some of that same indulgent self-wankery with which Simon Reynolds is trying to build his place in history. You hit something that so explicitly requires a new term to describe it that you are driven to that obscene act of agglutination. And I'm going to do it. And I'm going to take shit for it. But nevertheless, here it is: Sweet Jesus IDM. Because that is the first thing that came out of my mouth when I heard the new release from those robot boys in Toronto.

Jason Amm's machines have all got to be solar-powered. That is the only explanation I can think of that captures how he manages to bring such warmth and organic life out of his keyboards and samplers. They can't be driven by cold electricity because none of the thirteen tracks here speak of anything other than the sound of summer unraveling on your window ledge. These are the lost melodies of childhood--the ones that you invented while entertaining your bevy of imaginary companions or splashing in the river or walking through the back lots with your best friend. Solvent is a panacea for everything that is preternaturally making your bones creak and your blood thin. When I become just a number in the System, I want to be ground up and my digital remains dropped into an input feed on one of Jason's machines. I will return as the warm melody bubbling through a Solvent song. This is transmigration in the digital era for those who have earned the chance to evolve.

Mark Teppo

Eye (Canada)
Dissolving The Past

Before techno got derailed by the fascistic four-four stomp of the house revival to create "trance," there was a moment when it seemed like the form would embrace melody and create something entirely different. Think of the fluid dynamics of Orbital's "Lush 3" or Aphex Twin's "Xtal" -- both perfect for a long night on the dancefloor and becoming one with couch and headphones. Pushed back underground by the enforced uniformity of the rave and club scenes, this music has always been a sort of "outsider art," the realm of the creative, single-minded individual and his or her toys. Solvent -- aka Jason Amm -- is a member of this vanguard. Solvently One Listens' 13 instrumental tracks are irresistibly, pathologically tuneful -- analog synths and antique electronics interweave mellifluously, taking the brain to a desirable theta state. On the inner sleeve, Amm credits the influence of such English synth-pop entities as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Fad Gadget. You gotta respect his honesty for giving props to such decidedly uncool sources, but it's a red herring. Though "Black Turtleneck" pays loving tribute to the tacky pretensions of the early '80s, the track flows with a humane grace that its robotic progenitors sorely lacked. Amm's masterful control of his machines makes the entire record glide blissfully along at its own unhurried speed -- accordingly, it's a much more soothing listen than recent efforts by peers µ-Ziq and Squarepusher. Aficionados of such artists are ordered to pick up this stellar release by a local artist. That's right -- he's a Torontonian. Find out more about Solvent, his label Suction Records and labelmate Lowfish at www.suctionrecords.com. 5/5

Jonathan Bunce

Motion (UK)
Growing up in 1980s Sheffield, it was difficult not to be seduced by the futuristic yet accessible sounds of the Human League and Heaven 17, and I certainly flirted for some time with their peculiarly attractive world. I didn't get as far as caking my face in white foundation and overdoing the eyeliner before ditching the synths for a misguided search for "authenticity", yet I spent some time fascinated by their other-wordly noises and crudely funky rhythms. As a result, listening to this release on Canada's Suction Records is a curious experience. A delightful descent into the sounds of 1983, yet simultaneously fresh and contemporary, Solvent could be crudely characterised as the missing link between Depeche Mode and Boards of Canada. I'm yet to hear a record so redolent of both the 1980s and the 1990s, and still a success. Although there's none of the droning, monotone singing the likes of Phil Oakey, Glenn Gregory and Dave Gahan oddly favoured, the record is warm, humane, and uplifting, largely due to the sharp melodic gift Solvent, aka Jason Amm, possesses. You may have heard the most engaging piece, "Duckie", elsewhere on the Solvent / Lowfish split 7" on City Centre Offices, but the record's chock-full of delightfully catchy midtempo tunes. "Black Turtleneck" is reminiscent of Boards of Canada's "Telephasic Workshop" - stuttering, chopped-up voices tracking a stuttering groove; "Solvently One Listens" and "Old Tin" are very Depeche. "Ten Cent Teeth" bounces and bumps along at a lively pace, and there are a couple of tracks with vaguely harsh sounds, but it's essentially charming - almost childlike, cheekily perky tunes. The sleevenotes acknowledge "the influence of Human League, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, Fad Gadget, Yazoo, Skinny Puppy, Lowfish, Aphex Twin, and Jean-Michel Basquiat." It's difficult to describe this any better than that list does, so I'll give up now and just lie back and think of Sheffield ;)

Dan Hill

Urban Sounds (USA)
Among the dictionary definitions for solvent is "the ability to pay one's debts." Solvent's Jason Amm sees to his dues in the more immediate sense in the inner sleeve of his second CD, Solvently One Listens, where he includes among his influences the likes of Human League, Yazoo, Skinny Puppy, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, and Fad Gadget. Not a bad list. But whether one considers those connections obvious or implied, Amm manages to pay his debts in a far more substantial sense in the space of the actual music. Solvent's music stands in direct relation to those artists not in simply resembling the dour but bouncy, charmingly imperfect synth-pop that occupied the more obsessive hours of Amm's youth, but in the more fundamental sense of being its latest evolutionary moment.

Like New Wave and pre-industrial EBM vis à vis prog rock and punk, Solvent's music occupies a distinct, and distinctly abject, cultural position -- unabashed in its reverence for melody and for immediate, uncomplicated emotional confrontation over technical self-indulgence and ironic insincerity. Similarly, where many artists in the age of desktop electronics have back-channeled the musical potential of machines in favor of the disinterested jouissance of abstraction, Amm has refocused his energies almost entirely on making music that's sincere and direct.

Amm's 1998 debut, Solvent, hinted at all of this. "Pineapple Boy," the album's opening track, was a wrenching fusion of tear-soaked nostalgia and naive optimism, the aural approximation of a reassuring hug in the same sense that the movies of John Hughes invoked the complex of emotions involved in growing up at a distance from something one both despised and longed for desperately. (That Hughes filled his paeans to teen angst with New Wave's poppier guard is certainly no coincidence.) "Pineapple Boy" was probably the first album's last-recorded cut; Solvently One Listens is, in its entirety, made of the same genetic material. From the octave-hopping opening bars of the title cut through to "Basildon"'s cheerful vocal stutter, Amm's velvet-lined melodies and delay-pedal beats cover delicate, sophisticated emotional terrain, and add up to some of the most arrestingly lyrical electronic pop of the past several years.

"Duckie," revived from a recent 7-inch on the City Centre Offices label, makes the Hughes connection plain by referencing Pretty In Pink's self-effacing outcast by name; the track's delicate, conceding air is heart-warming. "Tape Recorder" tames the notoriously tough-to-quiet TB-303 into producing the charmingest melodic bounce. Solvently's most austere cut, "Black Turtleneck," is Boards of Canada done right, the filmy resin of brainless nostalgia replaced by a creeping bass figure that cues to Amm's more complicated relationship with the past. Another of the dictionary definitions for solvent is "something that provides a solution." To the endemic problem of by turns under-nourished and over-indulgent electronica, Solvently One Listens is at the very least that.

Sean Cooper

Vital (UK)
If you are a regular guest to the world of hip dance music, then you must have noticed the return of electro music. Once brought to you by Depeche Mode, Human League and Yazoo, now the territory of labels like Bunker and Suction. The latter brings us the second full length by Solvent, the quick rising star and part-time owner of Suction. His thirteen pieces breathe the atmosphere of the above early 80s groups, but always less the vocals. The part with the beats have been firmly updated to today's standard, but the synths are surely old, dirty and above all analogue. They arpeggiate, buzz and humm. It's about time, that bands like Solvent (and label mate Lowfish) get a singer (male or female) and start singing about industrial wastelands, waitresses and only you. Then, they will be on MTV, signed to a major and no more promo's for me. But now, before they move along they deliver a very fine electro album.

FDW

Solvent's Mom (Canada)
In response to the Vital review.

Jason,
Good - I actually listened to half of your CD on the weekend. It certainly sounds a lot more upbeat than the music you used to create when living upstairs. I liked it but it does need a singer -- me!!!

XOXO
Solvent's Mom