The weird thing about early synthesized pop was that it made a quick, self-aware leap from signifying a shiny, electronic future to a sense of cheery, almost inane frothiness. Early Moog-tweaking musicians and engineers spent a lot of time figuring out how to electronically warp the work of baroque composers into ironic juxtapositions between tradition and technology, but eventually they had to come to terms with the fact that much of it still registered as grotesque distortions of nuanced melody. And for every musique concrète and BBC Radiophonic Workshop genius who turned those limitations into successfully arresting experiments, there was someone like Jean-Jacques Perrey who thrived on the potential of the equipment's inherent pop goofiness. Combine the cheerfully dippy, utopian enthusiasm of late-1960s electronic music with the more whimsical strains of the same era's psychedelic experimentation, and the end result can be clamorously demented at worst. Or best.
Of course, it means something drastically different to invoke that synthemesc horrorshow now that it's 40-plus years in the past, what with a couple of dozen hours' worth of Gary Wilson, Stereolab, and Black Moth Super Rainbow having had their say in the intervening decades. Twirligig is the first full-length album from Sydney multi-instrumentalist Jonti Danilewitz, and if it follows those aforementioned artists' archly playful approach to retrofuturist synth-psych, it also embodies it in odd, frivolous little songs that are as intricately constructed as they are naggingly irritating. Once the second track and highlight "Nightshift in Blue" is done working its sun-bleached, rubber-limbed Pet Sounds vibe, the rest of the album falls into a succession of woozy, disorienting, somewhat uncomfortable assemblages of brow-furrowing sketch-songs that often amble along a little too preciously for their own good.
Sometimes the tone is overly quirky: "Firework Spraying Moon" and "Begone Slumber" are short, slight, and often pretty, but in a way that seems too slapstick, like the notebook-paper-doodled title sequence to your typical indie comedy film. Sometimes it's almost obnoxiously overstuffed with noise, albeit in a half-speed, low-energy way, as in "Spooky Sport" and the layers of screeching bird/rubber/guitar/Atari ambiance that make its quasi-Polynesian swoon so bracing. And sometimes it feigns one of those moods before dropping the other on you. "Nodlews Way Home" stabs its ambling, mellow blues lope between the shoulder blades with a piercing, oscillating synthesizer squall that seems to be drunkenly picking a fight with the rest of the song. And the title track feels like two half-finished ideas haphazardly stapled together to make a quarter-finished song, a rhythm-machine and faux-Theremin reverie pushed unceremoniously toward a fuzz-synth drone through a tunnel of overbearing distortion.
But credit where it's due: Irritation and bafflement might actually be part of the intent, especially when they're so often used to cut through moments that would otherwise feel a bit pat in their serenity. It clearly took a lot of work to assemble some of these noisy, chirpy things, and there are a number of odd little details of four-track alchemy to unearth, even though the bulk of the songs clock in at less time than your average commercial break. It's pretty dense stuff: Every sound melts into itself with such viscous goopiness that eventually it's easy to forget that what you're listening to may have involved instruments at some point, rather than just the residue of some kind of ancient digital ectoplasm. It is a bit ephemeral, but not quite as music to relax to-- more like music to be bewildered by. And there's real craft in the way Jonti manipulates his multitracked vocals, pulling them apart to disorienting, clashing effect or merging them into seamless harmony. In either case, he's got a good sense of how to shape his voice into power-pop harmonic wonderment. It's not a good enough sense to avoid having it buried in the mix, rendering the occasional lyrics not only indecipherable but almost beside the point. But sometimes you've just got to let the machines win.
