(07.15.07) Ryan Breen, moonlighting as Back Ted N-Ted, has created something special. This is the kind of CD you’ll find yourself showing to your friends, mentioning in conversations, and listening to when nothing else sounds good anymore. And yet there is nothing wildly original about Pop Animal. It is simply a well-crafted and often surprisingly beautiful collection of songs.
But these songs point to something larger going on. Recently, there has been a noticeable undercurrent in electronic music that seeks to add more of a human voice to the singing of the machines. This trend has brought real musicianship back to the forefront, andBreen , along with his collaborators, are very capable musicians. The liner notes thank a number of people for singing as well as playing drums, horns, Rhodes, harmonium, piano, and other instruments. But it is whatBreen does with the recordings that makes this such a wonderful hybrid of human and machine. He samples and cuts up these live instruments and voices to make startling juxtapositions of the familiar and the unfamiliar, like the pairing of a rapping mechanical voice and a sung human voice in “Exit Credits,” or the excellent Rhodes and piano playing on “Opening Credits.” This creative tension is even evoked in the title of the album. Pop Animal suggests that Back Ted N-Ted follows certain formulae, constraints, constructs of machine-made pop music while still leaving messy animal fingerprints all over the final sound.
These fingerprints are the reason this album is so memorable. They are the little surprises, the colorful Easter eggs that are hidden underneath the rhythm and melody. On the surface, a song like “Leisure” is adubby, downtempo affair with mellow hip-hop drums and slow funk bass. But there’s far more to it than that. It’s teeming with non-repetitive noises that bubble and burst to the surface and then disappear. Some listeners may be put off by the IDM touches–staccato beat loops, unpredictable rhythms, washes of digital noise–but I find that they serve a larger purpose here. They are parts of the whole, essential pieces of the songs themselves, rather than simple markers of the producer’s skill. Back Ted N-Ted sidesteps the IDM pissing contest that values novelty over nuance. Ultimately, what you remember here is the song, and the feelings it evoked, rather than the tricky programming or clever sampling.
Why is it a death knell for an artist to call his sound mature? This is music for grownups, but that doesn’t mean it is in any way boring or undemanding. Pop Animal is an ideal album for the cynic in all of us who only looks for novelty or kitsch in music and has forgotten what it’s like simply to enjoy.
Pop Animal will be available in August ’07 on Abandon Building.
