Penguin Cafe - The Imperfect Sea

Pitchfork 64

Laid up in the south of France after ingesting some bad shellfish back in 1972, British guitarist and composer Simon Jeffes experienced fever dreams of a world “of ordered desolation… a place which had no heart.” In the days after, Jeffes dreamt of its cure, wherein “the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing.” Jeffes also had a surreal poem pop into his head about being proprietor of the Penguin Cafe—and by 1976, he had established the Penguin Cafe Orchestra bearing such properties. They were one of the eras more charming and baffling entities, daydreaming between ambient, Balearic, drone, Irish folk, pop, world, classical, all of their output exquisite and slightly aslant. Which is perhaps to be expected from the man who was game enough to couch Sid Vicious in orchestral strings for “My Way.”

The Orchestra disbanded only when Jeffes passed away from an inoperable brain tumor in 1997, and since a Royal Albert Hall concert in 2009, his son Arthur has released three albums in the new century, carrying the torch. Or at least carrying the name, as his Penguin Cafe features no members of the original ensemble, instead compiling contributions from members of Gorillaz, Suede, and Florence and the Machine. (Some of the old Penguin Orchestra continue to perform this music as the Anteaters and the Orchestra That Fell to Earth). Arthur has the pedigree, if not the history, for this 21^st century Penguin Cafe.

Their website states that since their audience is more attuned to dance music, the group is a corrective in replacing “electronic layers with real instruments: pads with real string sections, synths with heavily-effected pianos.” Fair enough, though such self-seriousness replaces the prevailing whimsy of the original and assumes that electronic music fans can’t also chill with Stars of the Lid, Alarm Will Sound, or even the Williams Fairey Brass Band. “Ricercar” most closely resembles the Orchestra of old, stately and bouncy in equal measure, the strings nimble like some Renaissance-era dance while the percussion comes from world music. But “Cantorum” has all the drama of an indie documentary soundtrack, tugging at heartstrings via bowed strings, a move now easily replicated by dozens of other composers.

The slow-moving “Control 1 (Interlude)” creates a sustained mood of careful piano notes that drop like melting icicles and humming strings, though it also most closely resembles the gorgeous minimalism of Bing & Ruth. The twinkling lyricism of “Half Certainty” and “Protection” align them with their Erased Tapes’ labelmates, meaning the pleasant and polite—if at times ignorable—aspects of ambient music.

Three covers are interspersed throughout the album. The most charming is a version of Kraftwerk’s “Franz Schubert,” a knowing wink to the original group’s own history—Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s first major show was opening for the Germans back in 1976. They play up the lullaby-like aspect of the original and, in a clever twist, close mic the sound of salt swirling around in a bowl in a manner that replicates the crackly shellac of an old 78, putting the futurists into a bygone time. There’s also a version of the original group’s “Now Nothing,” expanding the track by two minutes but reducing the original’s blend of strings and voice to just piano.

It leads into the closer “Wheels Within Wheels,” a cover of Simian Mobile Disco. But instead of a big build, the beats are replaced with rattles and cycling piano that create plenty of drama and tension before slowly peeling away. The notes describe making the four on the floor from “floorboards in the old Penguin studio,” which seems like a rather circuitous route to take to get to a thud that barely registers. In the years between the two iterations of Penguin Cafe, all manner of composers and ensembles have tackled the likes of Aphex Twin; the novelty of mixing electronic and acoustic has long since worn off. Coming as Penguin Cafe Orchestra did amid the clashes of punk and progressive rock—on a roster featuring meticulous new composers like Harold Budd and Gavin Bryars—the elder Jeffes’ playfulness was refreshing. Three albums in, it’s yet to be determined just where the younger Jeffes aims to take the group, but there’s a rigidity to The Imperfect Sea that approaches ordered desolation.