It's been a while since Alexis Georgopoulos worked under his Arp moniker, leaving three years trailing in the wake of his last full-length album, The Soft Wave. He's worked in art and modern dance in the interim, but Georgopoulos has clearly spent some time thinking about how to retool this project as well. The Soft Wave was all balmy synth textures and endlessly repeating figures, sometimes lightly prickled by waves of bass and distorted guitar. Georgopoulos found his voice toward the close of that record, forgoing his mostly instrumental work to deliver a pitch-perfect pastiche of Brian Eno's 70s vocal work on "From a Balcony Overlooking the Sea". Surprisingly, it's a thread he picks at for the bulk of MORE, settling into a more song-oriented incarnation of Arp that might cause people familiar with his older work to check the package to make sure it's not some other band.
Where Georgopoulos has landed is somewhere in-between various strains of the British art school tradition, where the mundane and the fantastic are equally enthralling. It's part Roxy Music sci-fi fantasia, part Blur down-the-chip-shop scruffiness. Georgopoulos is interested in glamour for sure-- song titles here include "High-Heeled Clouds" and "A Tiger in the Hall at Versailles"-- but it's a scruffy, vaudevillian form of it. The sad, clangorous end to "Clouds" feels like a paean to actors who couldn't quite make it, to singers who had a shot at the big time and just fell short. It's heavy on pastiche, but very well done at times. You won't hear a better piece of Eno worship than "Judy Nylon" this year. Even the title is wonderfully Eno-esque. It's too bad Georgopoulos waits until the closing track, "Persuasion", to get anywhere near the same sense of pop euphoria again.
So there's a strong sense of someone not reaching particularly hard to get beyond their influences, but even that takes on an appropriate hue as the album progresses. MORE edges into the feel of low-rent theater at times, where the makeup starts to run under the lights, where the performer on stage is revealed to be a fraud. Georgopoulos does a blues track and he calls it "(MORE) BLUES". He's emptied out pop and found a bunch of dead ends, all circling back in on themselves. Still, this isn't an exercise in the futility of writing this stuff in 2013; it's more like a light, cheerful prod at the parameters of pop. Along the way we get plenty of ambient interludes, hints of Brill Building pop, a dose of Beatles-y goodness. There's a sense Georgopoulos isn't sure what Arp should be, allowing him to resist being shaped, packaged, and neatly filed away.
In among all the switching up there's a centerpiece to all of this, if one can exist in such a baffling, un-centered piece, titled "Gravity (For Charlemagne Palestine)", which is one-part Steve Reich repetitive build, one-part Spiritualized-style astral gazing. Naturally, going from that to the cheeky end-of-seaside-pier tracks takes some adjusting. But MORE is an album that takes some time to settle in, to really get to grips with all its diverse tendencies. Already it feels like it could become a weightier work over time if Georgopoulos leaves all this behind and moves on elsewhere, causing this album to perpetually spin in its own odd orbit. It's mostly a delight to return to, with its misshapen ways sometimes working toward a bigger picture until Georgopoulos flushes it all down the u-bend via another baffling turn. Here he's got a musical outlet that's not defined at all, and that's a strange and occasionally beautiful thing.
