A Closer Listen
For those of us in the Northern hemisphere, the winter solstice has passed and the shortest days are behind us. But the nights are still long and the excitement of the holiday festivities has worn off. We need a musical pick-me-up with a high sugar content. Two new albums fit the bill, with their unconventional approach to instrumental rock. Both are as colourful as their cover art, with eccentric blends in their sonic palettes. Both will make you groove around your kitchen. They might give you fuzzy VHS visions of little green men and supervillain hideouts.
A rock trio with added keys and synth, mega cat have an infectiously tight rhythm section to keep us moving. The bass and percussion paw their way from lounge to funk, from trip-hop to Afrobeat. Even in the more sombre and reflective tracks, they give an uplifting energy to the album. “Celebrate with Port!” begins with a muscular bass phrase and an off-kilter beat. Guitar and synth take turns to form retro soundtrack melodies or retreat into textural swathes. On the standout expedition, “Don’t You Ever Get the Creeps?”, spacey guitar tops off a funk rhythm. Hand drums in the right places transform the feel of the track.
While the rhythms get us moving, it is the melodies and textures that lead us places. The album has a psychedelic feel which is difficult to pinpoint. Occasionally the music is spaced-out. But mostly mega cat are a crisp outfit, with just enough dreamy, vintage touches to veer into mind-expanding. The lead single, “Rat Fight”, is the groovy theme song to a long-lost espionage caper, with added horns picking out the bold points of an action-packed title sequence. Across the album, retro reverb gives a cinematic sweep to the guitar. Combined with dreamy synth and keys, the camera pans through laid-back summer sun, melancholy backstories, and triumphant finales. If mega cat were a film, it would have gone straight to television in the 1980s. It is now hailed as a long-lost classic by the long-haired dudes at your local film festival.
Multi-instrumentalist Nicholas Tripi is the drummer for a band called Big Fun. Accordingly, his debut solo album is immensely fun and impeccably drummed. Loud World is an aggressively happy and danceable album, with a backbone of energetic rock and roll rhythms. Combining this with rapid staccato phrases and unpredictable melodies, Tripi invokes kosmische and math rock recreated on alien technology. Joyous layers of synth, guitar, keys, and miscellaneous sounds pull the album in all directions. A studio engineer in his day job, Tripi has composed, performed, recorded, and mixed this album. The result is an accomplished, polished record with a wild sense of chaotic humour. Tracks titled “Klonk” and “Plomp” can hardly help being funny. We imagine which colourful creature might make such noises in Motohiro Hayakawa’s cover artwork.
From hallucinogenic techno-samba to deep-space cocktail music, Tripi looks through a kaleidoscope that blends exotica releases of yesteryear with the radio waves of the future. Sci-fi B-movies are a probable reference point. From spaceship races to interstellar heist montages, this album offers a new and vibrant soundtrack. Many of the tracks are paradoxes, containing exciting counterpoints in tone, mood, and pace. Spacey textures and plink-plonking melodies sit beside frantic rhythms. The beat travels at warp factor eight whilst curious synth tones stretch out a background of twinkling stars. (Samuel Rogers)
Sat Jan 27 00:01:50 GMT 2024