Saturday, June 2, 2012

Junior Electronics' puzzle palace pop

Happy Saturday...roads washed out from storm last week, five mile trip to town is now about 20 miles going round, Sean's taking SATs today, wish him luck...someday the pace will slow down but for now still struggling. Here's a review that went up yesterday at Blurt.

Junior Electronics
Musostics
(Bureau B)

A mesostic is a form of wordplay where a vertical list of words is aligned so that a word or phrase is formed horizontally. (The Mother's Day poem that starts "M is for the million things she gave me" is a crude form of mesostic.) Joe Watson, a sometime Stereolab keyboardist and High Llamas producer, applies this principal to music, building complex, interlocking bits of baroque pop that tick along like clockwork, while producing bizarre, accidental bits of poetry in the way the elements glance off of one another.

Watson puts a lush palette of instrumentation in service of his abstract ideas, bringing together synthesizers, guitars, harpsichords, organs, pianos, machine drums and fluttery vocals together in lavish yet cerebral combinations. Overall, the sound falls somewhere between XTC's most elaborate psych pop, Stereolab's intricately patterned drones and the warm, humane electronics of the Morr Music stable.

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