As he did in the mid-‘80s with the insistent, unforgettable singles “Perfect Way” and “Wood Beez,” Green Gartside drops back into the world, his sound of surprise intact and singular. His sonics a cross of Laurie Anderson and the Beatles, Gartside, aka Scritti Politti, confects remarkable tunes that, no matter how opaque their lyrics, quiver with melody. Listen to him and start thinking like him: loopily, parenthetically, dreamily.
One could call him psychedelic except his sound — check out the patience, the purposeful open-endedness (that’s no oxymoron for Green) of “No Fine Lines,” the cautious optimism of the hurdy-gurdy flavored “Snow In Sun” — is so spare.
Constructed in his home studio,White Bread Black Beer evokes the Brian Wilson of “In My Room,” the Laurie Anderson of “O Superman” and, in the way Gartside teases language into new shape and meaning, the under-heard, brilliant American songwriter Van Dyke Parks. Like those others, Gartside creates work that is unique and unmistakable, and he’s a master of musical form. “Dr. Abernathy” is a slippery, bizarre drug song that conjures the Beatles of “Revolver”; “Petrococadollar” (the word tells you all you need to know about political finance) is moody, ephemeral; “E Eleventh Nuts” is looped hip-hop shot through with Pacman percussion loops in a complex call for gender equality.
“Locked,” one of the sweetest tunes with its layered guitars and velvet vocals, is a love song. That’s all. That’s everything. That’s the way it is with all these songs. It’s pop drenched in technology and philosophy.
The complexity and the allusiveness (or is the elusiveness?) are what get you about this disk: It seduces with its sound, then snares you with its thought, the way it runs on verbally in the midst of such tight arrangements, such well-built atmospheres.
Gartside put the thing together in his home studio, and there’s a technocratic aspect to it in the way it exemplifies the notion of the hermetic genius who creates perfectly sealed universes of sound, a tradition that encompasses rockers from Todd Rundgren to Steely Dan to Stevie Wonder. And dropout geniuses like Brian Wilson, alone with his thoughts in his sandbox.
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