The press blurb makes a huge deal of the ‘distinctive’ vocal style of singer Chris Griffin (no, not the character from ‘Family Guy’, but one quarter of Brighton’s Anti-Ghost Moon Ray collective), which is described as ‘gloriously androgynous’. ‘There aren’t many other singers around who sound like this,’ it tells us. This much is probably true, and of course, it’s my job to give it a fair hearing and decide if it’s a good thing or not.
Naturally, I was intrigued by the prospect of an artist who ‘channels various styles of electronic music – 80’s pop, house/techno, 90s R&B – and weaves them together to form his own sonic trajectory in an otherwise heavily-populated musical orbit.’
It starts of promisingly enough with ‘Making Eye Contact’, which combines squelchy electro and Krautrock with hectic techno beats… then Griffin’s vocals enter the mix. And it’s more or less downhill from there.
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It soon descends into a blandfest of slick, soft-focus 80s electrofunk. Try as it might to build some kind of dynamics, the album fails to really stretch beyond monotonous loops of bumping bass, niggly synth noodles and bad retro drum sounds (the whole Akai snare thing’s done to death and just sounds like Rice Krispies. Griffin’s vocals really don’t help. It’s not that he can’t hold a tune, because he can, even if said tunes are somewhat lacking in imagination. The trippy vibe of ‘Stray Kids’ is naively sappy, and there’s a kooky tweeness that permeates many of the tracks. The long words demonstrate Griffin’s vocabulary, but make for some cumbersome couplets and lumpy lyrics.
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