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| There is something unsettlingly lazy about L Pierre's second album, Touchpool. It is the result of the collusion of orchestral samples, drum machines and the occasional live musician, making up a relatively short album of seven tracks in just over half an hour. Unfortunately, Touchpool is a frequently dull and unengaging album that would only see serious play as inoffensive background music. And that is hardly the greatest of accolades. (The cover of this album curiously juxtaposes the rather flat, bland music with its rude red painted fingernails resting on pale flesh.) |
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L Pierre is the mostly-one-man band of Aidan Moffat (who is in turn half of Arab Strap along with Malcolm Middleton), his sampler and drum machine. Some of his musician mates also drop into the studio provide several live elements, such as guitar, bass, trumpet and so forth that are then integrated, collusively, with samples. Moffat's L Pierre alter ego was first exposed in Hypnogogia, the debut album, which featured similar sampling techniques and a childlike charm.
The very first track, "Crush," illustrates how a simple sampled mournful classical motif is married to an ascetic drum pulse, layered with occasional fragments of harmonies and bolstered with effects. But by the tail end of this track's four minutes nothing has been said; the start of a statement might have been made, but it does not challenge or demand attention because there is not enough substance to sustain it. "Rotspots From The Crap Map" derives directly (and almost shamelessly) from Amon Tobin's orchestral soundscapes. It is far more interesting than "Crush," yet suffers from a relentless further piling-on of dissonant orchestral parts that do not make sense in their context.
The album's most distinctive track, "Jim Dodge Dines At The Penguin Cafe," is a kind of cheesy feelgood pastiche of gentle (live) pedal steel guitar and bobbing rhythm. It contrasts so strongly with the rest of the tracks that it jolts you out of the sleepy stupor created by the featureless landscape surrounding. Maybe this inconsistency is a good thing, I am not sure.
I said that there was a 'collusion' between the album's elements (i.e., a secretive seamlessless between elements), but this is often not the case when we constantly hear inorganic drum machine beats struck uncouthly against the stretches of orchestral lines. It almost echoes the misfit album cover. "Total Horizontal" and "Baby Breeze" both suffer from this fate; it jars the ear and mars the aesthetics of each track. Touchpool also trips over again in this collusion in "Velbon" which, as Moffat describes, contains "a loop from [Beethoven] and sounds like Brian Eno." Fragments of the middle movement of Beethoven's "Pathetique" piano sonata are spliced together irritatingly in a way that creates nothing original from the pieces, and ultimately becomes a totally unessential two-and-a-half minutes.
What this album tells us is that it only takes a sampler and drum machine to make something that sounds passable. And where Touchpool falls short consistently is in getting past a base infatuation with the capabilities of the instruments used (sampler and drum machine), and really focussing on getting some musical meat on its rather skeletal style.
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| Stuart Reeves - 3/10 |
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