Thighpaulsandra‘s voice is all over this one, words full of shady vampirics and sliding context, your imagination stitching the suggestion as they suck in the scenery around them. He’s a great story-teller too (I reckon he has a lucrative future in audiobooks for sure), fleshy and descriptive, the narratives noir-flowering a certain flamboyance that sets your synapses a flame with its vivid economy.
The associative array of “Brown Pillows” is sonically skewered, its dissonant bursts swerving the surreal as a trail of ducks fall into the abyss. “Hanza”’s vivid details electrically sparking to a tensile throb, Thighpaulsandra’s pronounced pout spilling over into the spurty sonics. “…[W]e take the corridor to the edge of consciousness” — his words seethe in a chemical comedown as those machines sing a beautiful accompaniment, dynamically drooling over the scene like a rogue Edgard Varèse, splashing around the acidic colour, as if salt had been rubbed into a wound and left to writhe.
“Helen Is Screaming” is possibility my favourite. It copulates in your ear in a strange tuberculosis of malfunction and Stockhausen-like hiccup before entering into a postnatal hallucination. Thighpaulsandra is clinging to the luxurious creep of his words, replete with their FX shadows, on the subject of some extraterrestrial intrusion, vivid imagery dispersing in spaghetti cyphers and experimental ping-pong. Pointed patternations of chords and thudding bass stabs that mingle with dramatic descends, as if desperately trying to nail-gun a vanishing apparition. It’s a compelling ride that takes The Golden Communion to a whole new level and then some, concluding in the inky nouveau-prog appeal and fashion advice of “The Goat Owl”. Here, Thighpaulsandra’s bold delivery swims in an industrialised funk, slipping its personality for a slow, radiant reveal of a song, the creamy pop centre bleeding harmonically into grinning crevices of esoteric circuitry.Think Practical Electronics With Thighpaulsandra is his best album yet; it trims the vision down to a concisely concentrated hit, an avant-pop slant that’s pithy, fertile, and one that fair-lights plenty of repeat listens. I know it’s early doors, but Practical Electronics launches straight in there for my album of the year too, with a great comedy cover to boot.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
