Album: Wreckless Eric

Bungalow Hi, SOUTHERN DOMESTIC

The suburban punk poet and avatar of lo-fi Wreckless Eric unexpectedly delves into electronic soundscaping for substantial parts of Bungalow Hi, which shares with his earlier work a healthy, albeit probably unwise, contempt for the commercial imperatives of pop. Songs such as "Ladypower" and "Sell by Date" are disconsolate surveys of contemporary mores set to windswept electronic backdrops that do little to disguise Eric's disgust with the way things have turned out, a pervasive theme that colours the album a bitter beige. Drabness is almost an infection in his world, raged against in "Local" and "Same", in which Eric admits, "I was brought up on bland, I was schooled in mundane/ We never had fancy when we could have had plain". But the years of torpor have clearly brought him to the end of his tether, judging by the un-neighbourly paranoia of "Zulus" and the 11-minute electro-dubscape of "Housewives". The best track is "33s & 45s", in which he sifts through the wreckage of a relationship -

The suburban punk poet and avatar of lo-fi Wreckless Eric unexpectedly delves into electronic soundscaping for substantial parts of Bungalow Hi, which shares with his earlier work a healthy, albeit probably unwise, contempt for the commercial imperatives of pop. Songs such as "Ladypower" and "Sell by Date" are disconsolate surveys of contemporary mores set to windswept electronic backdrops that do little to disguise Eric's disgust with the way things have turned out, a pervasive theme that colours the album a bitter beige. Drabness is almost an infection in his world, raged against in "Local" and "Same", in which Eric admits, "I was brought up on bland, I was schooled in mundane/ We never had fancy when we could have had plain". But the years of torpor have clearly brought him to the end of his tether, judging by the un-neighbourly paranoia of "Zulus" and the 11-minute electro-dubscape of "Housewives". The best track is "33s & 45s", in which he sifts through the wreckage of a relationship - from the "blood on the walls" to the records, shared out between the couple; it turns into a High Fidelity apologia for a life played out at 33 and 45: "It might be just a load of old plastic to you, but it's my life." Now, where have I heard that before?