It's easy to forget that when Adult. started out, the Detroit outfit was lumped in with turn-of-the-millenium electroclash acts. Though husband-and-wife duo Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus shared the genre's new wave-meets-art-punk aesthetic on paper, the couple was always more obtuse and insular than its unwitting peers. The group didn't cultivate a glitter-flecked stage presence like Fischerspooner, or practice theatrical aggression like Chicks on Speed, and instead saturated its sterile music with a skeptic's paranoia and a sense of uncompromising mayhem. Often, the band's mixture of post-punk, coldwave, and chilly techno was used like a scalpel to make the listener feel supremely uneasy. (The title for the band's second LP, Anxiety Always, still reads like a mission statement.) Now, six years after Adult.'s Why Bother? LP, its new record is finally seeing a release. And though Miller and Kuperus may have been absent for a while, their extended hiatus doesn't appear to have changed their bleak worldview. The Way Things Fall may represent a more streamlined version of the band, but Adult.'s commitment to churlish electro-punk is as staunch as ever. Read more »
