There’s a kind of playful painting-by-numbers vibe to this quirky electronic record. Everything is put together like just-about-matching Tetris blocks. Distorted and fizzy drums and clunky bass-lines clank and clunk against each other like pop music from the Bizarro World. Anyway, all the whistles, and beeps, bleeps, and slightly wonky 4/4 rhythms are more than the sum of their parts and there’s none of that annoying preset sounding atmospheric nonsense that we get a lot of these days. Indeed, lots of the sounds sound charmingly home made.
Unfortunately the vocalists do not. They sound like factory presets – there’s the Thom York button, the Beth from Portishead dial, the Syd Barret pedal, the weird Asian pop vocalist fader. In actual fact, it contains contributions from Martina Topley Bird and Terry Hall and others, but the inlay card with the promo doesn’t say which are which. One way or another, like a lot of producer-made records the various vocalists give it a bit of a disjointed feel, which disturbs the continuity created by the otherwise enjoyable Bizarro Tetris aesthetic.
Anyway, my favourite tracks were the Looper meets Serge Leoni mentalness of ‘The Exotics’ and the sega megadrive romp ‘Little Acorns’. The wailing histrionic cover of Norwegian Wood is silly though. Overall it’s probably not ‘the most exciting and forward-thinking record of the year’ as the press release pre-emptively declares, but there’s enough going on here to while away a sunny evening drinking ale and dreaming of robots. And generally that’s enough for me.

Key Track: ‘The Exotics’