Blogarhythms

In my write-up on Chairlift’s new album from Tuesday’s “shuffle” post I shared a glimpse of the lack of awareness of my own music collection that I sometimes face. What’s even more absurd than realizing I’ve been regularly listening to a song all my friends have been asking me to find them for months though is hearing my homeboy Emeyesi play a song on our radio show (now podcast) and asking him “what’s this” only to learn it’s a song from an album I own.

I’m embarrassed either happens at all. And while neither happens often the latter occurs more frequently than the former. In fact, something like this happened just last week. A springy track with 8-bit synths, chunky drum sounds and lyrics about a couple who leave all manner of human excretions coating every surface of a borrowed flat popped up on Emeyesi’s playlist, prompting me to inquire as to it’s origins. When he told me it was Sportsday Megaphone, a.k.a. London-based bedroom musician and singer Hugh Frost, an artist whose album, So Many Colours / So Little Time, was sitting on my desktop at the time, I felt a pang of disappointment. How could something I’d enjoyed listening to on my own suddenly sound unfamiliar just because somebody else was playing it? But the self-chastisement wouldn’t last because he quickly explained how the tune, titled “Young Lust,” was in fact a non-album b-side to the “LA” 7” single.

I was relieved at the news that I hadn’t previously heard the song but still a bit irked that I hadn’t been able to pick up on the artist, because I really had enjoyed So Many Colours / So Little Time. So much in fact that I’d been inspired to take notes of my initial reaction to the record the first time I listened through. I was excited by this new addition to my ever-growing collection of Robopop gems, which sounded to me like ex-The Clash guitarist Mick Jones and his Big Audio Dynamite project, if it were produced by Joe Goddard of Hot Chip, if Hot Chip were characters from an old NES game. The influence of ’80s synthpop and vintage video game soundtracks is pretty evident in the music. As are subtle traces of contemporary Hip-Hop, R&B, and electronic dance music in all it’s variegated forms. And it’s always unmistakably punky, reflecting his DIY ethos (he’s a one-man-band comprised of a dude with a guitar and a laptop) and “stay posi” posture sonically.

Though it would be fair to describe So Many Colours / So Little Time’s pixelated Pop-Punk as Tighten Up, Vol. 88 versus Coming On Strong as heard blaring out of Mega Man’s walkman, it’s not just that. The pastiche of buzzing & blipping synths, searing electric guitars and drum programming that clatters & thumps is like an exuberant poppy Punk band — like Tokyo Police Club or Matt and Kim — remixed by MGMT, Ratatat, Crystal Castles and J-Pop/Chiptune acts YMCK and De De Mouse. And the vocals — gentle spoke-sung verses and anthemic shouted choruses — delivered in a distinctly accented, almost rhotacic pronunciation, recall the likes of Edward Ka-Spel of Legendary Pink Dots, The Streets‘ Mike Skinner and the aforementioned former Clash member. It’s a post-modern urban electronic sound that should appeal to ears that found pleasure in recent releases from Bloc Party, Metronomy and TV On the Radio, and anyone who counted themselves a fan of Australian New-Rave troubadour Muscles‘ Guns Babes Lemonade from last year.

Above all though it’s Frost’s songwriting — which shares a conversational directness, a topical and thematic inclusivity, an urgent frankness and a spirit of eccentricity with that of The Streets and the boys from Hot Chip — that is both his and the album’s most outstanding and original quality. “LA” for example — where he deconstructs the behavior of the wealthy and self-righteous Scientologists he observed while in Los Angeles, comparing it against the rampant homelessness that exists in the very same city — deals with ideas largely unprecedented in Pop music. But it’s only the tip of the ice-berg; the most obviously visible example of his songwriting prowess and topical depth. Songs like “Black Plastic,” which describes a sunset bike-ride through a cityscape beset with problems, “Adventures After Hours,” where he runs down a laundry-list of phony occupations over an 808 beat and playful keyboard figure that would serve Jeezy, Weezy or T.I. well, the pickup artist’s lament “I Think It’s Love,” “Less and Less,” a song about the personal wisdom that comes with age, and “Meet Me In the Middle,” a pubescent sexual dilemma, are almost Morrissey-esque in their poetic use of honest, plain-spoken language to elucidate abstract concepts and complicated emotions.

Sportsday Megaphone “Black Plastic”

Perhaps the record’s title reflects my own difficulty in managing my music collection? There are just so many records and so little time. So, I think I can forgive myself if I’m unable to commit every note of every song I’ve ever heard to memory.