Survey Channel / Pumice Stone & Other Vignettes

This is an ultra-modest petri dish of tiny, tentative experiments of synth and tape warp which is all the better for its refusal to open out into the puffed-up grandiloquence of that perplexingly vast genre of ersatz-vintage electronica that seems to preoccupy the minds and wallets of every sunless male I meet these days. It has no boring narrative or OST pretensions of being from an imaginary but wholly boring movie. It never wades out into developed themes of pomp prog and it refuses to don a supporting truss of tired, tired, tired, tired beats that tired, tired, tired, tired men reach for whenever their ladle fulls of analog synth gloop are sounding too much like ladles full of analog synth gloop - you know, gloop you have heard a million times this year even though you tried your best to turn off the tap. So bravo, Survey Channel for making a collection of virtuous and engaging vignettes that whimper and flicker and flash and bend and fold and stop and rub up against each other in interesting ways and don't amount to much more than a tiny test-tube testament to their creation by an alert musical mind.    

Repo Fam / Whipped Cream

Apart from the price tag ($8!), this EP could have come out in 1987. Maybe it did. Repo Fam may or may not be happy with that notion. It doesn't matter either way. Does it make it timeless? Static? Conservative? Depends on your age, I guess. It does sound like a tidier Sonic Youth or a looser Lovechild. That is going to be no bad thing for many. And a ho-hum thing for some. Sonic Youth were a ho-hum thing for people who saw Television. Who were ho-hum if you'd seen The Modern Lovers. Who were overly naïf arrivistes if you'd ever borne witness to the Velvets and the Stooges. Who came over white and stiff if you had encountered Bo Diddley in a small room. The present needs its present but it isn't the present of churn, novelty and progress. It is a present of recherchement and recovery, reminiscence and reference. Pop's present is the youthful clamour for unclaimed points of a highly-indexed culture. And if you are do go back and uncover, best make sure you are cool about it and recognise what is cool and remains cool and then stay cool when you deliver and record. Repo Fam are cool because they dig cool stuff like Beat Happening and Kenneth Anger films and 'The King Of Marvin Gardens' and their PR puff pulls the levers marked The Fall and Half Japanese because they are cool - not cos they are happening hipster catnip but cool. Hipsters aren't cool 'cos they end up in knots thinking that shit like Toto or Van Halen or Fleetwood Mac are cool when they are not and never will be.

There are four songs here and the third and fourth ones are best: 'Whipped Cream' and 'Here We Come'. They walk the precious/cheap, art/pop, pretty/petty, poetry/thump lines most successfully. Singer Michelle Peña's delivery is best on those two songs, too...escaping the Gordon-isms of  track 1 to find something that is winningly off-hand and beautifully off-key and resonant with something more private, less historical. Peña's timely tufts of synth speckling are another very positive feature of a promising set of recordings. Now, Repo Fam just have to find more of now and more of them to put into whatever they do next. I'll be listening.