“The way you look tonight / It’s science fiction!” Critics make a big fucking deal about spontaneity, but this intensely odd new Misty Roses album makes abstraction and theory sound pretty excellent, actually. Not that I’ve got any particular insight into the making of the record: I’m guessing, but this shit sounds so improbable it seems like it just had to have been theorised and planned out in advance. Basically, Villainess is an album of melodramatic love songs, delivered with the unnatural pairing of pretty pop ambience and brash, enthusiastic shouting. If you’re an imaginative person, you might be able to picture Brian Eno and Eddie Argos of Art Brut forgetting the words to a set of Burt Bacharach songs (don’t worry if not). The album came with a press release stating that it “dwells in the space between dream and reality, as classic film stars, friends and lovers coexist on a plane of melancholy beauty,” which is clearly a hard sentence to take seriously. It says a lot, though, about the high romance at work here, as well as the over-intellectualisation of the sound Jonny Perl and Robert Conroy have cobbled together, which is so complete and bizarre that it’s turned out amazing.
[Misty Roses MySpace]
[Buy Villainess from Frog Man Jake Records]
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