Friday, February 27, 2009

Straight Outta The Tundra


There are more ideas crammed into the 41 minutes of Max Tundra’s third album than most bands manage in their whole careers. Parallax Error Beheads You, the third Max Tundra LP and his first since 2002’s Mastered By Guy At The Exchange, is a masterpiece of micro-melodies and sound-bytes; a triumph of splicing, dicing and editing.

It’s an intricate mosaic of sounds and styles, some of which you might recognise from the last 30 years of pop, rock, prog, disco, funk, techno, rap, metal and soul, but many of which are completely new: either from a startling recombination of existing genres, or from Max inventing an original one himself. The attention to detail, and the sheer speed at which ideas whizz past you in the mix, will leave you stunned.

“Each song contains many facets and genres, and the starts of songs are often stylistically extremely different to how they each end up, touring via a few styles along the way,” says the man himself, going some way towards explaining why there are multiple, simultaneous or sequential, melodies during each of the 10 tracks on Parallax, and why one song can sometimes sound like seven different bands from totally different worlds playing at once—”Glycaemic Index Blues”, to name but one of the songs on the album, is like Yes playing glitch techno with Pharrell Williams fighting Todd Rundgren at the controls while Green Gartside offers his creamiest falsetto. Just call it cosmic glitch-pop R&B.

What the hell does all that mean? Simply put, Max Tundra makes crazy glitchy, fidgety, soulful stuff that bounces like one of those superballs through genre's and beats. Just check out the Mixtape and you'll see the frenetic pace that Max Tundra keeps. Crazier stuff you are not likely to hear.

Download: Playboy
Download: 30 Minute Mixtape

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