TIP OF THE TONGUE 09 AUGUST 2009
Julian Lynch
Orange You Glad
Olde English Spelling Bee OESB-41
LP
OUT OF STOCK!
You might have spotted Julian Lynch’s name as a member of Ducktails and Predator Vision, but behind the scenes he has been amassing a fairly formidable catalogue of solo CD-Rs that are near perfect articulations of Hypnagogic pop. Orange You Glad is his debut LP, a collection of four track recordings cut at home in Ridgewood, New Jersey and in Madison, Wisconsin, where he is a student of ethnomusicology. The album consists of a series of songs and instrumentals that exist in a zone that is totally beyond technique. The recording is crudely sophisticated, with an instinctive, naturally musical feel even when the sonic aesthetic is beyond the whole Xpressway/Siltbreeze ethos of destroyed fidelity. The bass is non-rhythmic in the extreme, appearing now and then, just out of place and time, functioning more as harmonic/melodic brackets that help to focus the music towards some kind of tonal center. The drums are crude, the guitar a punk blaze of almost-Kurihara style tremolo and fuzz. The gorgeous, soaring vocals at first seem to work against the grime of the music, the kind of high multi-tracked harmonies that would re-locate The Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl” into the raggedy environs of Tori Kudo’s Guys N Dolls play the music of Chris Bailey and Ed Kuepper but it’s an inspired marriage, with the massively devolved nature of the jams colliding with the angelic vocal arrangements to birth an atmosphere with the kind of benign punk urgency first postulated by the early Modern Lovers. Then there are the instrumentals and mood-pieces, where Lynch brings in aspects of his ethnological studies, with Eurasian melodies and even high-life style guitars crowned by coronas of circular reed work, peaking in an instrumental with a clarinet part so beautiful it feels as if it was plucked right out of your dreams as you fell asleep in front of the TV aged 12. It’s a truly unique album, one that combines savagely primitive rock breakdowns with some of the most gorgeous Hypnagogic stylings to come out of the whole Ducktails/Predator Vision/Real Estate scene. Orange You Glad announces a major new voice. Highly recommended.
