Nole Plastique – Escaperhead
Escaperhead is the second album from the Russian duo Nole Plastique, who seem to have discovered the history of avant pop music through two separate ports of entry: Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd and Christian Fennesz. Within these two references, Nole Plastique re-engineer a particular variant of psychedelia that may have started at one time with simple songs for a couple of guys singing and strumming on their guitars. Yet when these wistful tunes are rendered through their arsenal of DSP tricknology, wooden rhythms end up grafted into the backbone of songs and studiously lysergic effects fire from every direction. The songs dissolve as semi-digitised ghosts with flickers of English lyrics and bright guitar riffs. In this Pink Floyd/Fennesz recombination, Nole Plastique are acutely aware of their American contemporaries (Animal Collective, Indian Jewelry, Black Dice), and while wonderously jubliant, Escaperhead occasionally suffers from being too calculated in the search for the ‘new’.
Jim Haynes