PUFFINBOY – Make Motion Matter (Foolproof Projects)
Posted: September 9th, 2005, by Alex McChesney“Glitch, new-wave, playfulness, art-school, analogue synths, spoken vocals, computer burbles and real drums.”
The first couple of times through this album, all I was left with was a tiny collection of applicable mini-phrases, but no real sense of what the record was actually like. You can’t really describe something as guitar-based and beat-heavy as this as “ambient”, but it’s an effective description of how it slips past you without leaving much of a mark, as though the record’s reasonably dense textures are constructed from some new space-material that looks solid but is hard to get a grip on.
Most of the songs on “Make Motion Matter” establish a groove early on and then are content to riff away on it, hypnotically, until running out of steam. “Lost in Location”, for example, being an hallucinogenic spiral of overlapping spoken-word vocals and angular guitar that barely changes throughout its five-minute-plus length, while the title track nods at the current DFA-led nu-disco-punk fad, but in keeping with the rest of the album the increase in intensity that normally justifies an eight-and-a-half-minute disco tune is glacial.
But while the album may lack cheap thrills, it’s never trite, clearly isn’t desperate for your approval, and finishes before it exhausts its welcome. A pleasant musical palette-cleanser between more substantial courses, then.
Alex McChesney
Alex was brought up by a family of stupid looking monkeys after being lost in the deep jungles of Paisley. Teaching him all their secret conga skills (as well as how to throw barrels at plumbers), Alex was able to leave for the bright lights of Glasgow where adventure struck him and he needed all his conga skills to save the world and earn the hand of a lovely Texan princess. He now keeps a low profile alphabeticising his record collection and making sock monkeys in the likenesses of his long lost family.
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