This usually isn't something readers (or writers) take into account when it comes to this site's reviews, but you might want to consider that rating up there a purely vestigial placeholder this time around. A 5.0-- basically 2.5/5 stars-- is essentially "not good, but not awful," which is an evaluation that kept coming to mind on the first few listens to this debut from the Stones Throw intern-turned-roster member. But it's also supposed to mean "mediocre"-- and nothing this willfully odd can really be considered mediocre. Welcome is a one-man show that emphasizes the DIY basement-band side to synthesizer funk, that rides hooks and grooves so relentlessly that they transmute from catchy to grating to hypnotic, that draws from Prince and Sly Stone and Beck and Pharrell Williams but amplifies the stuff that made them eccentrics well over the stuff that made them pop. Take Pants' labelmate, the notorious borderline-outsider artist Gary Wilson, replace lounge-jazz with 1980s r&b, remove the thematic obsessions over mystery girls and phrases like "bitch" and "chrome," and you've got a start. A damn weird start.
Chances are that this album will alienate the shit out of you quite a bit before you start catching on to its fucked-up charm, and you might even give up before you get to that point. There's something kind of obvious and silly about the sounds on this record, particularly the synths, which seem to be chosen specifically for how dated they sound. And few of these songs really get much further than the establishment of a catchy riff and a steady, heavy drumbeat (live or synthesized) with some wailing Moog noises and the odd half-shouted lyric laid over the top. There's actually a fair shot that you'll be horribly repelled by this music, much in the same way and for the same reasons a lot of people seem to have this seething, boiling hatred for "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!"
But it's hard to actually consider Welcome a bad album, mostly because it has this inexplicable likability: It's bizarrely comic without coming across as cheap irony, and it's pretty clear Pants lays down these semi-instrumental jams because he wants to have fun and make noise with some once-expensive, now-dated (and, subsequently, currently underheard) musical machinery. It helps when he has someone else along for the ride-- like Deon Davis, who contributes silky-smooth vocals to two of the tracks, including the wobbly Holiday Inn soul harmonies of offbeat debut single "Ka$h", or 70s/80s electro-funk obscurity Gary Davis, who co-produces the affably dopey but backbone-slipping "You're the One".
Yet even on his own, James Pants is capable of laying down some jams when he wants to: for every afterthought-sounding Casio-demo-button-gone-wrong semicomposition like "My Tree" or inebriated, rhythmically hinky roller-boogie botch job like "I Choose You", there's a song that puts weirdness to its advantage: Opener "Theme From Paris" sounds legitimately exciting in its overenthusiasm, all thundering drums and seething synthesizers like a 13-year-old John Bonham pitted against the soundtrack to Sega's arcade classic "OutRun", and the damaged on-the-fly rapping of "We're Through" has the same low-budget naifish whimsy as some of the better stuff from the similarly Prince-minded indie-electro goofs in Sexual Harassment.
I can't unreservedly call this album good-- yet-- but I can definitely recommend that you listen to it, because there's not much out there that really sounds like it, and for every moment where you think its sheer whacked-out sloppiness is going to give you a headache, it delivers a flash or two of giddy brilliance. You know why this gets a 5.0? Because I can't give it a picture of Roger Troutman giving a flying elbow drop to the animatronic gorilla from the Rock-afire Explosion band.
