London duo Robin Saville and Antony Ryan prefigured the laptop twee-pop boom by more than a year with their 1998 release, Beautronics. A collection of primary-colored analog fingerpaintings and wispy drum patterns, that superior debut established a candycoated electro-naif aesthetic that the pair has adhered to since. Even as their home label Morr Music flirted more overtly with shoegaze, vocal pop and post-rock conventions over the years, Isan remained blissfully faithful to their template, releasing a string of albums with little-to-no variance between them.
According to their official website, 2004's Meet Next Life affords a "mild expansion" of Isan's sound, which is a probably just a generous allusion to the fact that Saville and Ryan have acquired an acoustic guitar and a glockenspiel in the interim. Certainly, many of the predominant textures in Isan's music have become more organic with this release, but their songs still float by as ever, in a pleasant but amorphous mist of brightly struck notes that hang together for brief seconds before evaporating from memory.
The sheer volume of notes that percolate through Meet Next Life might insinuate it to be a melodic record, but the truth is that by tinting the room with its persistence of texture, it functions more like ambient music than anything else. Relying on things like wood blocks and winding watches for rhythms, Isan don't seem to pay much mind to the low end of the frequency spectrum. Just as with ambient, there's a bias here towards the middle and upper frequency registers-- anything to make the music swirl and hover.
And so it does, almost relentlessly. The songs pass into each other without fanfare or much in the way of differentiation. Aside from the breezy, guitar-aided opener "Birds Over Barges", the insistent chug of "Iron Eyes" and the miniature waltz of "Sat73", Meet Next Life feels transitional, incidental and affectedly dainty-- like the intermission music between acts of a stage production being put on by Playmobil toys.
The last five years have already yielded more than enough records that sound like the precious machinations of a miniature cuckoo clock, and surely Isan have been responsible for their fair share of those. But as this particular chapter of laptop electronica passes on, suffocated by a bubblegum pink avalanche of similarly superfluous records, one can't help but think that Isan need nothing short of a massive Notwist-shaped U-turn to veer out of the self-parody zone.
