| 2002 was hardly the year of the bowl-cut. Bright Eyes' opus and Kweller's confessionary were lost in a stampede of electronically induced fringes heading straight for the dancefloor. Glossy girls issuing fashion tips over throwaway beats. The disco militia holding us to ransom, it really was like Dazed & Confused were squatting in the aisles of record stores around the country. But where did the fragility go? The cloying vulnerability? It was distilled into Dntel's digital debut, that hard disk diary of sorts - part urban reflection, part bummed out lover, part lo-fi beat surgery - was filed next to Four Tet and Manitoba in many an electrohead's shoegazing section, and a welcome installment it was too. Clue to Kalo is all suburban pastoral - shy glances and nervous melodies, braces and bike stabilizers, front lawn ballads and a long lost summer or two. The record makes a clumsy pass at your heart through breathy vocal melodies held by wire and string, songs scaffolded by errant, stray programmables: "This Is Over By Inches" and "We'll Live Free (in NYC)" are more music less the teddy bears and "Still We Felt Bulletproof" is an affecting vocal segment drowned out by Casiotone percussion that builds to something very special indeed, hitting home with the mantra "Let's go back to the days when things were so much easier in every way / Where you could pick up memories without even trying / Breaking off with lovers without even crying / Say 'I'll never leave you' without even lying..." Immensely saccharine I admit, but I'm not easily sold on this kind of thing. More importantly, it's the point at which Mark Mitchell sounds like he means it, like he's gone into some dark recess to rescue some of that all-elusive sincerity, then capped the wistful off with a layer of icing for our listening pleasure. The Dntel bug is spreading. brace yourself for a tide of timid powerbook poetry, net-drakes and misanthropic mouse handlers laying E.E.Cummings quotes over dyslexic percussion. In the meantime make do with this cluster of literary stanzas - a lean dosage of dapper beats and poetic nuance to keep the clashers at arm's length. - Absorb |
2XLP/Out Of Print