WORD SOUP

A strange, delightful and idiosyncratic collection of experimental music brimming with potential but sadly held back in my opinion by a number of problems. I should emphasize first and foremost that, being someone who makes music with similar means, I am most certainly not one to scoff at the fact that this album was created out of instrument samples on a digital audio workstation in lieu of live instruments. I think DAWs are legit and not at all inferior music making tools, but composers who use them often run into the trap of attempting to imitate a live sound with insufficient means, and the arrangements on this album are somewhat of a mixed bag in that regard. The synths and other keyboard sounds are quite rich and varied, and the drums are generally unobtrusive, but the guitar sounds show some hiccups: when it's soaked in a healthy amount of reverb and delay, such as on "For To Dress Himself", it sounds fine, but without that it tends to come off as flat and unnatural. Track 2, "These Apricots And These Peaches Make Me", has the potential to be a very cool avant-prog-rocker in the style of Present, but the tinny, muddy bass and unconvincing lead guitar puts it not quite on that level for me.

My other main problem with this album is that I cannot get into the vocals. Project leader Ken Robinson has adopted a Schoenbergian Sprechgesang vocal style reminiscent of modern R.I.O. singers like Elaine Di Falco: half-spoken, irregularly paced and unpredictably rising and falling in pitch (which is made even more alienating in the case of this album seeing as how the lyrics, taken from the notoriously inaccurate Portuguese-to-English dictionary "English As She Is Spoke", are all in broken and barely comprehensible English), but Robinson's delivery here sounds a bit too cartoony to properly do the part: his voice doesn't have a charismatic, songlike quality to it, and often it feels like it's just getting in the way of the music. The only track where everything feels well integrated is "For To Dine", an abstract sound collage that sounds like serialist music: here the vocals (which are themselves sped up and manipulated throughout the song) feel like they're on even footing within the intriguing, organized chaos in which even the weird, overly staccato guitars don't feel out of place.

In compositional terms alone, this album is a winner as far as I'm concerned. It covers a lot of stylistic ground, from free jazz noise ("A Thousand Civilities") to hellish Univers Zero-style R.I.O. marches ("He Has A Good Beak") to spooky jazzy shuffles ("The Stone As Roll Not Heap Up Not Foam") to polyrhythmic minimalist études ("Familiar Phrases"), and yet it feels like a coherent and consistently interesting whole. The talent and commitment involved with this project is gleaming, and I look forward to the creator's future endeavours.