Starting off like a curious mixture of Beck, Syd Barrett and Holger Hillerbefore getting considerably weirder as each track progresses,barely-out-of-his-teens Philip Guichard lays zonked-out vocals overtwitchy, glitchy, chopped-up bedroom soundtracks to produce a noise bothbeguiling and annoying. Think "Lady Godiva's Operation" remixed by theNeptunes on a budget.
But it's not all as good as that sounds. If this was on vinyl I'd play thefirst side all the time and only flip it over when I wanted to make theneighbors cry. After the first few crunchy gems, the louche, sometimeseven catchy tunes disappear beneath a sludge of bleeps and unfathomablenoise with increasing rapidity. Promisingly goofy vocals, wayward slideguitars and triphop beats lull you for mere seconds before morphing intoalien grunts, overloaded junkyard clatterings and a soup of speaker-warpingnoise. It's said Phiiliip wrote and recorded a thousand songs between theages of 14 and 18 and at times it sounds like he's piled them all onto thisalbum, one on top of the other.
There are more ideas - not necessarily good ones - on each track than mostbands come up with in their careers. But right now the guy needs a produceror an engineer to tell him to stretch out, keep the needles out of the redonce in a while and let his creations develop organically and breathe. Andfor such a precocious, widely
(Catch him live if you can, just a cute, messed-up boy with too many vowelsin his name and his tape machine - the album tracks stripped of theirsuperfluous schronk and beefed up with some spiffing Neneh Cherry samples,or so it sounded to me. Looking like an enfeebled Denis Leary who wanted tobe Iggy Pop but decided to be Morrissey at the last minute and clingingonto the microphone stand for dear life, he'll slouch right into yourheart.
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