Like the EP release before it, Programm's debut full-length, A Torrid Marriage of Logic and Emotion, opens with their Icarian single "Like the Sun" and closes with gloomy comedown "ZeroZeroZero." Bearing the album's title in the lyrics, the latter's inclusion doesn't surprise, and with so many dramatic, impressionistic sequences questioning how we design our own identities around the ones we project on others sandwiched between those bookends, we're given a more complete study of the complicated relationship between nature and machine that the band hints at in their name.
Programm don't offer any answers to the existential problems they fuss over on the album, but it's an enchanting matrix to get lost in. Guided by cold vocal takes from Jackie Game and Jacob Soma, it's all floated through the pulsing, daisy-chained vein of cold wave and Joy Division-era post-punk, but it's also a deeply textural and diverse collection that smartly layers dizzying horns ("Chemical Fires") next to tracks that drum up reference to Spector's iconic boom, boom, boom, snap ("Waiting").
(The Hand)Programm don't offer any answers to the existential problems they fuss over on the album, but it's an enchanting matrix to get lost in. Guided by cold vocal takes from Jackie Game and Jacob Soma, it's all floated through the pulsing, daisy-chained vein of cold wave and Joy Division-era post-punk, but it's also a deeply textural and diverse collection that smartly layers dizzying horns ("Chemical Fires") next to tracks that drum up reference to Spector's iconic boom, boom, boom, snap ("Waiting").
