reviews / 2010

DOG IS BLUE - Hot Air Balloons

Name: DOG IS BLUE – Hot Air Balloons
Item: Hot Air Balloons
Rating: 7
Author: Gabriele Benzing

2010 (Facekick)

songwriter

by Gabriele Benzing

Hot air balloons to tackle a journey around the soul in eighty days, submarines to venture twenty thousand leagues beneath the hearts: with a retrofuturist, Jules Verne-like flair and a dreamy, intimate gaze, Paul Watson (aka Dog Is Blue) returns with a new EP, "Hot Air Balloons", led by the track the Canadian songwriter had premiered on OndaDrops, "Hot Air Balloons (And Submarines)". An immersion into Watson's personal Canada through reinterpretations of a handful of tracks by his favourite local artists, once again alongside the voice of Laura Heaney and the backdrop of toy-like sounds that also ran through his debut album, "…Makes Ghost Noises".

"Song Written Upon Getting Cut By The Argos" is nothing less than a tribute to the CFL Session project, a collection of recordings by Canadian football players from the Seventies (!), recently unearthed by folk music scholar Henry Adam Svec and ethnomusicologist W.L. Altman. The bitter humour of The Burning Hell's "It Happens In Florida" reveals a streak of dazed lightness, while on "Blankets And Bones" Jenny "Omichord" Mitchell's folk sensibility is dressed in skewed electric shades. Closing the circle is Gorf, the multimedia artist known to his family as Michael Duncan McArthur, who lays down a carpet of rounded beats for the final remix of the track that gives the EP its title. It's like playing Flaming Lips with a toy keyboard in your living room.

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15/03/2010

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Gabriele Benzing, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition