In 1997, Stuart David was Belle and Sebastian's bass player, and Looper was his side project with his wife Karn David. Then he left Belle and Sebastian to concentrate on Looper, who made three albums and a few singles between 1998 and 2002 before going wherever it is that pleasant, unassuming little bands go.
And now we have this five-disc boxed set of Looper's (nearly) complete discography, including the new "guess what, we're back" album Offgrid: Offline (available separately only as a download). It's not straightforward reissues, though: all the tracks have been resequenced into thematic compilations with neologistic titles. One, which starts with their most-frequently-used-in-movies-and-such track "Mondo '77", is devoted to instrumentals and near-instrumentals. Another, which starts with one version of the how-Karn-and-Stuart-met story "Impossible Things" (and features another half an hour or so later), collects the tracks on which Stuart reads spoken-word pieces in a subdued voice over not-especially-intrusive musical beds—the sort of thing he'd done with Belle and Sebastian on "A Century of Elvis" and "A Space Boy Dream".
A third assembles the band's more straightforward pop songs, like 2002's "Fucking Around", an unnervingly violent cousin to "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head". Then there are two further catchall song-based discs. One of them claims to draw on hip-hop and R&B-inspired ideas about beats (Looper always did like DJ-scratch sounds), and the other on a broader range of electronic music, but the distinctions aren't especially clear in practice. Both are also generally the Looper recordings that have aged most poorly, like a 1999 single called "Who's Afraid of Y2K?", in which Stuart's repeated murmur of "maybe Y2K will bring the rain" occasionally gives way to weary electro-burbles.
This seems like a very strange way to reframe the work of a band whose three previous albums can be found used online for a penny apiece. Looper have always been a mix-CD band—a track at a time can be a refreshing interlude in a collection of music by other people—and if their earlier records rarely stuck their heads up too high, at least they had a welcome variety of approaches. But sorting their music into stylistic piles exposes their weaknesses. Their best songs ("Uncle Ray", "Burning Flies") have a bit of bitterness and swagger about them, but too many others are anemic sketches—they've got a nice keyboard tone, or a decent rhythm loop, and perhaps a little snippet of melody, and then they just shrug their shoulders and do their thing for a few minutes.
"It was mainly Best Ofs I liked when I was growing up," Stuart noted in a recent Philthy Mag interview. "That was what really made me want to rearrange the tracks for the boxset. Into something like a collection of Best Of CDs." That's not how best-ofs work—and, actually, a tight, smartly sequenced Looper greatest-hits album would be a likable addition to an indie-pop shelf. These Things clarifies the band's aesthetic, but it makes them harder to listen to.
