Arthur Nasson

It is a really heartening experience to find an album that is not immediately ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and that doesn’t obviously fit into any particular pigeon-hole – on the other hand it is also very difficult to write a review about an album with so many different facets, some of which are brilliant and some simply dreadful.

The album is arranged into three sections or ‘Suites’ and I have to be honest and say that I really couldn’t detect when one section had passed to the other so best to treat the album as a whole but it isn’t easy even then!

After the trippy Beach Boys harmonies of ‘Summer Drops’ the full on pop-blast of ‘Bounce’ which has some brilliant piano and some of the worst drumming I have heard in years. ‘The Other Side’ gives you cod-reggae with a huge, echoey, bassline and a drumbeat that is about an eighth of a beat behind the music – this guy needs to find a drummer urgently! ‘Bubblefish pt 1’ on the other hand is led by the drums and creates a bizarre lo-fi theme that John Peel would have loved.
In Part II we get more of his odd phrasing and multiple musical personalities including the lovely but disturbing ‘Unravel’ and ‘Orb’ that seems to describe a shimmering and static entity using single drawn out notes. ‘Firefly Chase’ sounds as though it could have been written for ‘Apocalypse Now’ – the scene under the bridge maybe, and ‘The Boy With The Backwards Guitar’ is exactly that – in this case his 9 year old son.

I have listened to this album in the car with less than wonderful results, on a quality hi-fi where the lo-fi nature of the recording sounded weak, on my PC, not much better and on an iPod where I got the best results. It does reward close attention but it is NOT bacvkground music. Interesting.