The Electric Penguins - Goodbye From the Electric Penguins
October 18th, 2006 by rui
If you can tell a lot about someone from the kind of friends they have then I guess you can tell a lot about a band from their myspace friends. The Electric Penguins, hailing from Ireland and named after the password to one of Paul McCartney’s sixties residencies, have Jane Birkin, Air, Karl Bartos (formerly of Kraftwerk), Kraftwerk (not formerly of Kraftwerk at all, it turns out to be a fan site), Sigur Ros and Laurie Anderson listed as their cyber pals. And that list will probably will give you some idea of what they’re about: vocoders, seventies instruments, quirky pop songs and downtempo instrumentals. In fact this is possibly the first pop album to be performed on period instruments since Lenny Kravitz ‘went digital’ a few years back.
The strict adherence to step sequencers, farfisas, mellotrons and the like makes for an interesting sound which can be sparse but is always crystal clear - a refreshing break from the cluttered sound that a laptop and a million plug-ins are often coerced into making. Although, as our Lenny found, whilst it may be a comfortable enough straightjacket for a single album I doubt whether this kind of instrumental Puritanism can last into a long recording career. The sound is reflected in the art work, a photograph in the decaying house of man whose wife has left him, although it’s not all cheesecloth textured doom and gloom - there are some genuinely uplifting moments here; all of the musicians have a flair for melody which the instrumentation helps to accentuate.
The standout tracks are the opening instrumental ‘Gelb’, all vocoder sighs and distant piano, ‘Translatlantic part 2’ (another instrumental) which is altogether more epic but no less lovely, ‘Lonnie’ which has a great chorus and single potential and ‘Blau’ which has one of the most beautiful piano sounds I’ve heard in a long time. Sometimes the ensemble and production sounds grating (yes, ‘Answer the Phone’, I’m looking at you!) but this is an engaging and promising album which feels like it has ‘grower’ potential.
Jez Wells
“Goodbye From the Electric Penguins” by The Electric Penguins is out now on Psychonavigation.
