AVEY TARE & KRIA BREKKAN - Pullhair Rubeye

Recording an album backwards isn't exactly a great idea, and yet Avey Tare and his wife Kria Brekkan (for the record, let's note the two come from Animal Collective and Mùm respectively) had it anyway, and ran with it. We don't know whether it was to disguise the thinness of their home recordings (we can just picture them by the fireplace, oiling the four-track) or the result of a deliberate artistic choice. In the first case, judgment on the album would have to remain suspended, since we haven't bothered (and won't bother) to play the eight tracks of "Pullhair Rubeye" in reverse to find out what's actually underneath. In the second (admittedly the more likely scenario), we'd rather not waste time dwelling on how beautiful and strange and esoteric reversed instruments and voices sound: the trick has been used at every level of pop music for more than forty years now, and it's baffling that anyone can still be amazed by it.

So let's try to judge the final product of the musings of this thoroughly well-matched psych-folk couple, and as for the eight delicate, acoustic, whispered, suspended and ethereal tracks that make up a series of fleeting sketches, as fleeting as clouds over an Icelandic sky, as transparent as the pupils of a young nymph, as faint as our own metaphors, blah blah blah, the verdict is: forget it. Or better yet, grab a random acoustic/psychedelic album from your collection, arm yourself with any audio editing program, reverse the tracks, and dream of worlds turned inside out. With vinyl it's even easier, you don't even need a computer.

A shame, because we would have loved to stage a media showdown between Avey Tare and Panda Bear, the McCartney and Lennon of 21st-century psych-folk, but no such luck. Panda has put out an excellent record, while Avey is evidently still too in love, and we all know that love, all too often, sends everything (the songs, in this case) up in smoke.

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30/04/2007