It probably bears mentioning that Max Tundra's second album, 2002's Mastered by Guy at the Exchange, is passionately, obsessively, madly loved by quite a few music-geek and critic types, including yours truly. Yet none of us harbored any delusions that our love-- or the 9.3 rating from this site-- was ever going to make the record popular: The sound of his music is pretty evidently Not for Everyone, and that's precisely where the love comes from.
Painstakingly assembled by a Londoner named Ben Jacobs, the music of Max Tundra is strikingly unique, documenting a whole other realm of pop music that seems to exist mostly inside one guy's head. There are recognizable things within it: streaks of quaint English pop and soul, oddball programming of video-game synth sounds, a keyboard sensibility that ranges from lite funk to a kind of gleeful prog-rock musical theater, and a happy calm that vaguely recalls Vince Guaraldi's Peanuts music. It's tempting to describe it all using some outlandish metaphor: I imagine a reality show where XTC, Prince, Aphex Twin, and George Gershwin have to live together inside the sound chip of an aging Game Boy. But that makes Max Tundra sound cartoonish and scattershot, when the surprise of this stuff is how much it can all feel beautiful, simple, and coherent.
Now, after six years spent programming on archaic Amiga music software, Max Tundra gives us the follow-up, Parallax Error Beheads You. At first listen, this set of pop songs may seem more cluttered and frantic than its predecessor; much like the string of remixes Jacobs has done in the meantime, the music here is peppier and more tightly wound, and more melodically serpentine than ever. Give it a few listens, though, and you begin to feel like someone is sneaking in while you sleep and removing twists and turns from the songs, or straightening out the rhythms.
The old line about literature is that a good book teaches you how to read it; in this case, a record might be teaching you how to listen to it. What starts out tricky and overwhelming quickly organizes itself in your head and becomes a joy to follow, to the point where you can delight in all the detail Jacobs packs in: The way he lets harmonies unravel and then step neatly back into focus, or how he executes chord changes by shifting the whole song down a few steps, like someone putting a thumb on a spinning record. What programmer spends six years on 10 songs without making sure every one of those details works?
A good starting point is the record's least tricky song, "The Entertainment", a quaint and sunny piece that sounds something like trance music for children. Another is the track that's bound to be the album's great takeaway, "Which Song", with its pop-soul vocals and creamy synthesizers. The 10-minute closer, "Until We Die", sounds like Tundra's answer to side two of Abbey Road, but the one I can't stop playing is "Number Our Days", which plays out like some kind of amateur musical about the afterlife, with sinister synth-funk verses and angelic strumming through the choruses.
For those who've been following Jacobs, the big news on this record is entirely personal. On his last album, he explained the way his lyrics work ("I only sing about things that happen to me") and talked rather a lot about having stolen someone's girlfriend, which neatly explained the title of his debut (Some Best Friend You Turned Out to Be). Not long into the first track here, a bouncy pastoral piece called "Gum Chimes", we get an update: Jacobs and the girlfriend in question have split up. Many of the lyrics that follow are, simply put, a lonely geek's lament-- the frustrations of a guy who's always distracted by a "future wife," yet can't find a girl to bring home to the family. I really can't tell whether this is wonderfully human, slightly embarrassing, or just honest, but my sense of who Jacobs is has jumped way, way forward with this record.
Thinking back on his last conversation with that girlfriend, Jacobs sings, "a pint of chicken soup came falling from my eyes." The fact that he's now actually selling cans of his own homemade chicken soup is mostly a joke, but it's also a metaphor; if this joyfully hyperactive record is what comes of his troubles, we're all the luckier. It's packed with ideas, some of which work beautifully and some of which are just a joy to hear play out, but most of all, it's still a whole other world of pop music-- an absolutely unique, enchanting, and irreplaceable vision of how the stuff can work.
