Genre: more goofus than gallant,
but fun all the same
June 2010
I've been noticing this sort of lo-fi
collection of experimental, pseudo-pop ephemera popping up a bunch
lately, and it's a titillatingly grab-bag approach to making and
distributing music, even if it churns out a somewhat unsatisfying
(or, at best, uneven) finished product more often than not.
The style reminds me significantly of the music of the 80s/90s
hometaper scene, in that the pieces sound like conceptual fragments,
experiments designed to test the waters of sound creation itself.
Gigantic Blonde Boy will jump from a synth-riffed
"Got Love, Will Travel"
knock-off to a mangled soundbox melody to avant-tape squalor to
acoustic anti-folk with the air of careless impulse, as if that's
just how things were meant to be done, and there's no real reason to
bat an eye at the matter.
Admittedly, this Gigantic Blonde Boy is
hardly invulnerable to the trappings of the manic hometaper
approach, namely that many experiment
don't pan out, and that the tape can't
really be seen as a cohesive set of songs, but rather as a
variegated tapestry of unrelated ideas. It simply
comes with the territory. Still, although none of these
casual noodlings ascends towards brilliance, the listener's joy
derives from poring through the fragments and isolating
unpredictable, winsome little tidbits amid the ephemera.
Given ample determination, there's bound
to be a little something for any adventurous
cochlea.