Matmos are a talented pair of intelligent and cerebral individuals. The creative and romantic partnership of (Pitchfork writer) Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt has produced such great previous works as 2006’s LGBT sound portraits-themed The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast which was an undeniably playful and absorbing experimental record. Supreme Balloon is something of an attempt to achieve a fresh pallete by ditching all the cow intestine/semen-amplifying antics and high concepts and concentrating on making everything using only vintage synths. However, it flounders under a lack of either effort or ideas or both into a mess of unevenness, questionable tracklisting, and toothless experimentalism-as-conservatism.This is simply not a good album. ‘Rainbow Flag’ starts things off perfectly well enough with a sort of alien calypso-type vibe but at best it just seems like it should be a nice little introduction. Unfortunately it’s the album’s biggest highlight. Following on from it ‘Polychords’ and its siblings ‘Mister Mouth’ and ‘Exciter Lamp and The Variable Band’ are sub-Art of Noise fuckabouts that, yeah, sound OK and manage to be vaguely entertaining but are hardly anything special and hardly anything that really goes anywhere new. ‘Les Foilles Francaises’ does a neat little electro-baroque thing but again it shouldn’t be a highlight- it should just be like a linking instrumental or something. After that, though, I’m not sure if the ultimate low comes with the hulking, impossible-to-ignore elephant-in-the-room go-nowhere behemoth 24-minutes of ambient synth non-textures title track or the sloppy way the thing finally staggers to a close with 5 minutes of some of the most interesting music on here buried/spread out over two untitled tracks, the first of which starts with 10 minutes of silence. And the second of which is only 6 seconds long, but still, that’s one thing- that’s just a bit of a waste of a new track. Whereas there are few things on this earth I find more irritating than albums that contain long periods of silence, particularly towards the end of them. And in this case there’s not even a case for atmosphere like there is (dubiously) with Kid A . It's just silence. Yawn yawn yawn - here’s some silence:See?Pointless. 39% Links Matmos [official site ] [myspace ]