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| Arts & Crafts is a very strange album. The Black Neon (the alias of ex-Fort Lauderdale man Steve Webster) has seemingly raided the vaults of 70s krautrock and come away clutching as many archaic synths and vocoders as he could carry. Naturally, using such instruments on an album in 2006 gives a slightly bizarre atmosphere to everything, and Webster mixes the resulting space-age synth effects with guitar-driven pop songs. |
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All of which makes for a very odd listen. The first track is the instrumental ‘Ode To Immer Wieder’, part Bowie’s Low, part Look Around You theme tune. This is followed by the endearingly strange ‘Ralph & Barbara’, which is about a German soldier who leaves the army and escapes with his lover to Mexico, sung in high-pitch over an acoustic guitar and low-key synth.
These two songs really set the tone for the album, and highlight the main sticking point. Throughout Arts & Crafts, you feel as though you’re listening to two separate projects shoe-horned together. There’s the experimental, instrumental synth-driven Black Neon and the melodic, song-based, guitar-driven Black Neon. Rather than attempting to integrate the two, Webster seems content to merely let them co-exist side by side.
The Black Neon sensibly chose one of the guitar-driven pop songs as the lead single from the album. Less sensibly, he chose the joyless Spiritualized rip-off ‘TX81Z’, when he could have chosen the gorgeous ‘Cast That Light’ or ‘Ralph & Barbara’. However, all three, as well as the other two pop songs, ‘Shoot Me Into Space’ and ‘The Truth’, have a slightly unfinished feel to them. None of them feel particularly well-constructed from start to finish. What you get from these songs is a collection of very beautiful moments, but there’s no real sense of cohesion or progression from one to the next.
As for the experimental side, it’s largely a quite dull experience. ‘Infinity Pool’, ‘Hollywood 1 2 And 3’ and ‘The Exit’ all pass by unimpressively. It is, after all, rarely much fun listening to someone messing about with synths. But there is at least one track that demonstrates what happens when Webster mixes his ear for a good pop song with his desire to experiment electronically. And it’s by some distance the best track here.
Penultimate song ‘The Ghosts’ is a beautiful piece of work. Synths bubble around over the top of an upbeat piano and synthesised strings. Webster sounds distant and affecting, the melody is out of the top drawer and everything is executed somewhere close to perfection. It’s an extremely frustrating glimpse of what an incredible album this could have been. You’re left wondering why a man who can create such a fantastic fusion of the experimental and the simple has spent so little of the album exploiting this ability.
Webster is clearly a man of great talent and ambition, and there remains the distinct impression that he does have a really great album in him. And although this certainly isn’t it, it’s a nice one all the same. If ‘The Ghosts’ is a sign of things to come, the next Black Neon album could well be something very special indeed. |
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| David Tandy - 6/10 |
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