I’ve been looking forward to this record for a long time. Ever since I first got into Mastered By Guy At The Exchange, Ben Jacobs’ record of twisted, alternately brief and meandering one-man-and-sometimes-his-sister-on-vocals synth-pop. I guess Becky might be too busy with Tunng or something nowadays but finally he’s back, Max Tundra, with Parallex Error Beheads You- more intimate, more traditionally song-based and I guess less unique, but still. Max Tundra!!!!!!

Whereas Mastered By Guy… opened with the frantic, disorienting ‘Merman’, Parallex Error opens with ‘Gun Chimes’, pretty and pastoral and so much more straightforward. It’s a statement of intent regards to Jacobs’ general shift in approach- I guess he kind of did fall in to this pop thing by accident, having started out as an IDM musician (not that I’ve heard his debut, IDM album at all, just, you know, apparently…), and here he’s into it much further, song-wise. Not that he couldn’t write songs before… ‘Lights’ and ‘Hilted’ and so much more on Mastered By Guy were so so wonderful but now its more like they’re just regular songs kitted out and twisted by the whole Max Tundra production sheen, as opposed to how twisted they are being, you know, like a fundamental part of the song. I guess what I’m saying is, you could play ‘Gun Chimes’ on a piano, or an acoustic guitar.

Not that this isn’t a weird record, because it is (and, I mean, if you want free-wheeling, then the likes of ‘Orphaned’ and ‘Nord Lead Three’ are free-wheeling enough). Its just weird in a more *mature* way, you know? Thematically, its more mature. All the songs seem to be about Jacobs trying to find, or having found, or I suppose he has found after having wanted to find the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with, but isn’t quite sure… or something. Well anyway they’re about settling down. “All through my life I have been distracted by a potential wife, then she found another guy, I understand I should wait a while before I ask for your hand, but I can’t resist just now,” he sings on ‘Which Song’, 7 tracks prior to the whole thing crashes to an end over a big, meandering, back-on-Mastered By Guy-form 11-minute (after an album of mostly mid-length tunes) rush on ‘Until We Die’ and “you will be my mate until we die.”

That- ‘Until We Die’ and ‘Which Song’, along with internet-romance pop classic ‘Will Get Fooled Again’, make up easily my most-listened-to triumvirate of tracks on the album. And it is ‘Will Get Fooled Again’ which has the album’s best lyrics (“I found a girl on myspace, in her profile there was my face,” “I found a girl on google image search, she was in the background of a picture of a church, I knew if we should along if we were able, I shouldn’t really bring her to the seder table”). Thinking about it, Jacobs is a really impossibly underrated lyricist. Even I hadn’t quite realized it before starting out on this review, even though I’ve had some of these going round in my head for weeks now, and going back to Mastered By Guy I’ve had that line from ‘Lights’, “only last week, I realized that the colours of the lights in my studio, were the same as the ones you conjured in my mind” stuck round and round powerfully in there for close to a year now. I think I recently read a discussion on DrownedInSound that seemed to think Guy Garvey was the best lyricist in the UK right now. That’s probably an unrelated point to actually, you know, commenting on the worth of this album and everything, but Jesus Christ, how can people be so wrong? You even *want* epic encapsulations of human experience? Try ‘Number Our Days’ hey- “nothing happens when we die, we don’t leave our bodies or fly off into the sky”. Get that.

So anyway yeah. This is a really good album. Its not quite as good- or, maybe just not quite as *imaginative* as his last one though, so um… if you don’t have that yet, buy it instead first. But it is a *really* good album. Probably (if there *is* a problem with it) then the biggest problem with it is that it, in terms of my listening to it, it is *so* skewed towards those three songs, ‘Will Get Fooled Again’, ‘Which Song’, and ‘Until We Die’, but even if those are like massively incredibly, the rest isn’t just merely solid. Yeah, it’s a really good album.
82%

Max Tundra on Myspace

Saturday night saw me take a trip into the heart of darkest Camden. Oh the horror, the horror. That Village Of The Damned where every spindly youth looks like they’re in the Klaxons. Making my own anti-fashion statement, I pulled on a stripey pullover from the Sainsbury’s Tu range and headed into town. There’s always a bit of inertia to overcome making the trip at weekends when you have a daily commute to the centre, but the lure of a Beirut show would have me rising like Lazarus from my deathbed. I’d been left spellbound after a Festival Hall coffee bar freebie in June between their gigs at Glastonbury and Koko – quite literally rubbing shoulders with the band as they meandered through the audience (and in the bogs afterward, but that’s another story). I was keen to see how a more formal show would shape up – though ‘formal’ is not the sort of word you’d ever use to label this bunch of multi-talented ragamuffins. It turned out I could be ideally qualified to act as a personal shopper for Beirut, and was I the only one to recognise Zach’s initial and fleeting skanky parka homage to Feargal Sharkey circa ’79? Only (mainly) violinist Kristin Ferebee would pose a problem. She looks like a bit of a Miss Selfridge girl – looking prim and proper amongst the rabble. But enough of the Trinny and Susannah. Let’s rewind and refocus. Continue Reading