Gobble Gobble – Neon Graveyard
Gobble Gobble come out of Edmonton in Canada, part of a small but apparently quite determined experimental music community down there under the Hydeaway umbrealla who seem to be doing some very good things. I was sent a CD sampler by this group a while ago, and it was interesting – it certainly showed that there seems to be a good bit of collective energy forming in that part of the world.
Cecil Frena, who sent me this, has assembled an eclectic and fascinating album of scratchy electronica which casts its blanket of crackling subversion over a few different genres. This makes Neon Graveyard, for me, rather more than just another collection of indie pop songs smothered in electronic clicks and whizzes and a constant hiss of artificially created background noise. Yes, admittedly, there is a lot of that particular technique to be found on this album, but it is never treated as the raison d’etre of the whole piece, as can happen in this particular part of the musical landscape.
What defines Neon Graveyard in my eyes is actually more the undercurrents than the surface eddies. Songs like O Sacred Dandruff and Piles of Salt seem to actually take a lot of cues from contemporary R’n'B, particularly in the style of the vocal delivery. They sound almost like R’n'B songs which have been put through a rather severe cycle in your dishwasher and this, you will probably not be surprised to hear, I like. At other times a form of Gameboy pop swirls into focus, then this same approach fixes itself to an interlude of piano (Ash Fountain, for example) which sounds superfically far more like classical than anything you’d happen across in an indie pop landscape.
This flitting from one underpinning genre to another, all held together by a more uniform style at the surface, gives the album both a really solid coherence and a happy variety. The style, in fact, fits the title very well indeed. I like.
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Gobble Gobble – Eggs in Carrion
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