[21 May 2008]
It’s a pretty enough song the first time you hear it: Ellinor “Bobby Baby” Blixt’s smooth, gently artless singing blanketed by F.S. Blumm’s spare mixture of electronic outbursts and gently-plucked acoustic guitars. This meeting of the Swedish singer and the German Morr label mainstay feels completely natural given the stature of such female-vocals-layered-overtop-glitchy-electronica labelmates as Lali Puna and Ms. John Soda, suggesting a jazzier variant on their merging of buoyant pop hooks and tech-head knob-twiddling. What this album lacks, however, is any of the solid melodic foundation that their peers always maintained at the core of their songs, offering instead what is essentially thirteen trivially minor variations on the same pleasantly listless song. Where Blumm’s electro-jazz noodling works just fine in the context of his own more experimental solo instrumental recordings, he seems unable to lay the proper groundwork for a more conventionally song-oriented record. The effect, then, is an album that manages to be mildly engaging for a few tracks, and then inoffensively dull for the bulk of its running time, all too easily evaporating from memory afterwards.