Phew - Our Likeness (LP) - Clear Vinyl

Phew’s Our Likeness is one of those records that still feels slightly out of time, a cool room you step into after walking through a crowded city. Released in 1992 on Mute, it came after a decade of connections that already made Hiromi Moritani a cult figure. She had cut a debut single with Ryuichi Sakamoto producing, then made a stark, haunted first album with Conny Plank, Holger Czukay, and Jaki Liebezeit. Our Likeness tightens those threads back to Germany and draws new lines too. The cast here is small but exacting: Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten, the late Chrislo Haas of DAF and Liaisons Dangereuses, and Liebezeit again. The chemistry is immediate. You can hear players who know how to build tension by not overplaying.

The record lives on negative space. Haas programs patterns that tick and pulse like machinery left running overnight, then Hacke stains the edges with bass, guitar, and muted electronics. Liebezeit’s drumming makes the floor feel solid under your feet, even when the room seems to shift. His calm, precision style, the thing that powered Can, keeps these songs from drifting into abstraction. Phew moves through it all at her own pace. Her voice sounds close, almost dry, with a slight echo that widens the room without loosening her grip. She does not belt. She leans. That restraint gives every word weight.

What makes Our Likeness special is the way it balances cold materials and human heat. There is a techno-industrial palette in the synths and drum programs, the kind of sound Haas helped define, yet the album never feels trapped by a scene. Hacke avoids metal-clang theatrics and plays with a painter’s sense of shading, a little scrape here, a low throb there, always serving the vocal line. You could shelve this with post-punk, experimental pop, or the more hushed corner of industrial, and you would still undersell how quietly gripping it is.

Phew writes melodies that appear like a phrase you half remember, then holds them long enough to feel uncanny. The tempos tend to sit in a measured middle, but the record never drags because the internal motion is so strong. Sounds arrive, recede, return transformed. A snare turns to a click, a synth to a bell tone, a bassline narrows to a single note. When the groove thickens, it hits like a steady heartbeat rather than a blast. The dynamic range is in the arrangement more than the volume knobs.

If you know her 1981 album, this one feels like a mirror with the light adjusted. The earlier record has the humid spaciousness of Plank’s world, the glow of analog tape, the ghostly orbit of Czukay’s treatments. Our Likeness is leaner and more schematic, but it carries the same intensity. You can also hear how Phew’s circle spanned scenes. DAF’s stark body music, Neubauten’s interest in texture, Can’s patient repetition, they all filter through her voice into something that is clearly hers. That is why the album has aged so well. It does not chase a trend. It perfects a mood.

Mute has kept interest alive with a reissue that has turned up in the bins again, and hearing this on wax is a small revelation. The air around the vocal, the click of the drum machine against Liebezeit’s cymbal, the low end glue of Hacke’s bass, it all blooms on a good pressing. If you stumble across Our Likeness vinyl at a Melbourne record store, do not overthink it. Grab it, then tell your friends to buy Phew records online before prices jump. Collectors who know Phew albums on vinyl will tell you the hunt is part of the fun, but this one is worth skipping the hunt if you can.

For anyone just finding Phew through her later works, this is the bridge. It links her punk roots and art-song instincts to the stark electronics she has explored in the last decade. For longtime fans, it remains a center of gravity, a record that shows how much can be said with the simplest parts. Every element has a job, every silence is active, every entrance feels earned. That is rare. If your shelves lean toward minimal wave, left-field pop, or the greyscale end of post-punk, Phew vinyl belongs there, and this is the spine you will see most often. And if you are browsing vinyl records Australia wide and wondering what will still sound new ten years from now, here is your answer.