Dancing has become passe for music geeks. The old cliche of a bearded dude dressed in vintage clothing, cabbie hat on his head, arms crossed, head imperceptibly moving to the beat is a woeful truth. Every now and then, though, the lights get low, the disco ball comes out and a bunch of idiots start twirling their glowsticks around. Late Bloomers, by former Israeli soccer player Guy Gerber, will keep those kids twirling their glowsticks, but not enough to push those bearded dudes to show their stuff.
Late Bloomers isn’t your typical techno album. Instead of the more bombastic and ridiculous flourishes so common to modern techno, Gerber’s approach is less beat-focused and instead offers a slightly darker aesthetic for the club kids. The traditional bombast and dynamism is not found in this kind of techno. The ideas developed within each song are more subtly explored and so, the songs tend to be long, as Gerber spends his time working through them, start to finish.
This is a cause for annoyance. Because everything is more subtly developed, songs tend to be overly repetitious as he returns to establish one beat structure and then goes back to explore a new one. This inflates the album’s length, making it 70 minutes long and at times, comes across musically boring. Despite these complaints, Late Bloomers is a solidly competent album. It’s not spectacular but, for the glowstick kids on ecstasy, it’s perfect.