Hello everyone and welcome to the electro-comedown. For all of you who have been dancing through the night, tripping your tits off and going stupid to anything with the tiniest beat, here is the album to see you through those dark twitchy moments where you can’t quite get to sleep and you’re not having quite as much fun as you were earlier on.
KONRAD stems from the Daytrotter scene (no, me neither), and has called in a cast of local luminaries to play roles on an album bursting with ideas that keep it away from any suggestions of it being conventional. There is a sense all the way through that this is an album put together not with painstaking methodology, but by testing different ideas and leaving them there, ill-fitting or otherwise.
‘Kites’ sounds like The Faint on the psychiatrists couch with the (hopefully) amusing refrain, ‘It’s hard to fall in love, with someone who’s in love with drugs.’ There is an electro sound dominating this album, but contained within are vocals and an attitude more akin to alt-folk heroes like The Accidental.
‘Osh Kosh’ and ‘These Nights’ are simple but catchy songs, slightly melancholy, but with an ability to make you bob about at the very least. It’s the sort of music that you can imagine being made in and amongst a fog, for there is something that stops it being too sharp, and at times it could be considered quite dreamy, were there not the layers of melancholy intertwined within the often child-like sound effects. The layered awkwardness of ‘Litigate’ (made quite priceless by the ‘bob-bob-bob’ backing track) almost doesn’t feel like the finished product, but the result of throwing lots of bits of ideas in one place and calling it a track. Yet somehow it still manages to sound measured.
The dedication to computer generated sound-effects generally works, with the likes of ‘Canyon Blue’ being less straightforward due to the often inappropriate sounding interruptions from noises that the more serious would turn their noses up at. But it manages to be entertaining and mildly amusing without falling into the trap of being novelty.
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There’s plenty of invention going on, and it would be hard to pinpoint ‘Girls Gone Wild’ is a fair indication that the tongue is firmly in cheek, a charming little nursery rhyme that sounds like Damon Albarn’s American cousin playing around with the Casio. ‘Shapeshifting Marathons’ sounds like Elbow, but more interesting than that. It’s a time when the ideas could have made for a more straightforward acoustic delivery, and the synths sound intrusive as a result.
Here and there are ideas that just don’t work, but you find that the song has already moved on By ‘When Worlds Collide,’ the space-ship noises do start to wear a little, the stuttering of the vocals has been used once too many and the rap included is perhaps ill advised. Overall the album is self-indulgent, but usually only to the level where you can kind of join in on the fun.
To try and pinpoint this into one simple sentence, ‘Loose Canyons’ can best be described as US electro influenced by UK melancholia, which kind of sounds like early Bright Eyes, but with less self-deprecation. There’s nothing to be taken too seriously, but plenty to be appreciated. It’s gloomy in one way, but surprisingly uplifting as well. It’s not a record that’s going to make your night, but it might be the friend you need when it’s all over.
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