Electric Mammal
Liner Notes
These songs contain, within the music, artistic and personal struggles. We are made to dance, to ponder, to cry, to rejoice, but to lose, and ultimately to waste. These songs celebrate and demonstrate these dynamics.
Famous Last Words recreates the long-lost over-produced sound of the late seventies that never fails to create a nostalgic feeling and memories of space fantasies of the time. It is a dramatic story of striving in the course of failure.
Neutron Sun is a bridge, combining orchestral soundscapes and arching melody with a four-on-the-floor-based beatscape. It pushes the story further into despair, where love recedes to the horizon and hope is compressed into the realm of dream, but yet burns all the brighter in its compression.
TakeOver is a fantasy of good-natured power exercised on a dance floor. It gives in to the 4x4 beat, with melody taking a back seat to an evolving chemistry of patches, calculations and effects with sonic surprises.
Dreamer, Dream is a further stage of the journey, into a subconscious state, as even the vocals recede into not much more than instrumentation behind driving rhythms and collective tribal electronicism.
Go Go Go, the sounds of which emerge from the dream, is a flashback to the mid-80s in its sound. It is a fantasy spoken aloud to an object of lust, an expression of an intense but unfulfilled, entirely carnal, longing.
Amazed Every Time flips the record. This is a love song completely from the heart. This love is amazing, and contains within it the same bittersweet sadness that is found in snapshots of loved ones.
Danger Night carries the more organic sound for another run. This time it is the ill-conceived joyride in a smarmy, gritty atmosphere, infused with the knowledge that you will almost certainly regret it.
Electric Mammal; the puzzle, the conundrum, the contradiction, and the singularity. Make out what you can and fill in the blanks for yourself to get a reward.
Comin' Atchya is the mathematical equation of the sound of intrigue, and proves irrefutably that creepiness can be fun, until it gets scary.
Won't You: a love song meditation. The melodic lines are long and aching, to the point that they must loop over themselves in order to resolve.
Giving It All Away, the finale, showcases a gigantic 100-foot underwater piano with a chorus of robots, and puts it to use backing an upbeat ode to unrewarded toil and futility, delivered with a knowing, good-natured sneer.
Because convention was not followed, the influences are combined together seemingly chaotically. But it is all through a pop lens, and there is an underlying integrity of rhythm, melody, harmonic progression and style. In sound, some of the songs embrace the raw; some the mathematical. Intentional juxtaposition serves to define, clarify, and intensify. In short, the goal is to make something altogether new and therefore, worth giving your money so that you can own a copy.
I would like to give a shout-out to Studio PH of Lincoln, Nebraska, and to one Chris Steffen, who provided his considerable skills and labor toward the mastering of this album. It would not have sounded nearly as good without him.
Bonus: large-size album art:
