Mixtapes & Cellmates sound nothing like what their name might lead you to expect – rather than some Soulwaxy post-modern cleverness, this eponymous début is an album of delicate contrasts.
The musical scaffold is made of glitchy electronic beats, like scattershot fragments of disco or out-takes from spoof R&B singles after being fed into a sampler and thrown down the studio stairs. Laid over the top of the percussion are sparkly xylophone chimes, sparse synthesizer basslines, chamber music strings, minimalist guitar lines glistening cleanly through baths of reverb … a poppy slant on post-rock, perhaps.
The guitar work nestles within this cage-work of production, with the crisp minimal percussion hemming in saturated noise, alternately lurking at a distance and swirling around your head. There’s more than a slight nod in the direction of My Bloody Valentine thanks to quivering tremelo’d chords, queasy pitch-shifting and tonal drifts, but it borrows more generally from the less extreme examples of the shoegazer sound - bright chords heard through thick blankets of effects and amplification.
Leading the way are the haunting oh-so-sensitive vocals, sounding a little too bored and withdrawn at times, but every once in a while hitting the nail of delicacy square on the head. It’s that lack of overstatement that sustains the whole album; while all the material exudes a quiet confidence and self-assurance, it’s refreshingly free of irony and knowing smugness. Sincerity in indie music in 2007 – who’d have thought it?
Mixtapes & Cellmates is an engaging album, and beautifully produced with a sharp eye for detail, but it doesn’t seem to quite fit together – at least not in the way my instincts expect it to. The tension between the deliberate pop stylings and the abstract noise elements seems to overwhelm the material rather than energise it, the whole album seeming to be engaged in a tug-of-war with itself, a stylistic stalemate with no resolution in sight.
Which may be the whole point, I guess … and there are moments like “Quiet” and “Distance Blinding Lights” where the balance hits perfection and you see what may have been Mixtapes & Cellmates‘ intended destination. But then you hit the mismatched themes of tracks like album opener “Hold”, and you’re left wondering if maybe you’ve missed the point entirely.
Mixtapes & Cellmates deserve praise for doing something so wilfully different, if nothing else – beating out a new direction for indie pop that has acres more honesty than the crap that clogs the charts. And while I found the sound distractingly disjointed, I found it growing on me as the album progressed - that contrast may be exactly the thing that endears them to other listeners.
Their willingness to fly in the face of fashion and consistency speaks well of them, too – it may not win them universal acclaim, but Mixtapes & Cellmates has the air of idiosyncrasy that hangs like a miasma around the more enduring cult album successes. It’ll be interesting to see where they end up on the strength of this unique début.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: Mixtapes & Cellmates, pop, post-rock, shoegazer
