Paul Duncan - Be Careful What You Call Home

You call it post-modern music. I call it laziness. It’s very easy to experiment, but by the time you put together a professional compilation, it had better be good. Mucking around belongs on a B-side because without a structure, the only thing you can hope for is to convince (by which I mean confuse) enough critics that you’ve actually put together music and not just sound. Should we really be impressed that you took the ambient sound of your shower and then faded it out for a synthesized series of bells being overwhelmed by static (“toy bells”)? Sure, that’s impressive...impressively creepy. Lyrics might help, and you’ve got a nice mellow baritone. But as you made clear on your opening track, “in a way” (which I swear sounds exactly like “no way out” the way you sing it), “in a time of wordy music” you’ve decided to just stand back and let sound do the talking. Instead, sound does a lot of jabbering, except for the rare case where you actually pull together a song. And even when you do, like in “you look like an animal” (which features, to good effect, a barnyard banjo plunking in the background), it’s still too easy to say you just picked random words. I could say the same thing of “toy piano”: I’ve improvised in front of a piano before; I even recorded it (in a moment of vanity back when I was eight, trying to start my own radio show), but I never sold it to anyone. I wouldn’t dare. So at least we know, for all this electric play, that you’ve got a massive pair. It’s a shame they can’t play a guitar or something (although the wide repertoire of instruments you jam on is damn near impressive enough). I normally only write reviews in the form of a personal plea to the artist when I think they could honestly be doing better. (Or when I’m lazy, and trying to illustrate a point about the so-called “artist.”) But with your impressive knowledge of music and wide arsenal of sound, it’s disappointing to see you Pollock it (which some will undoubtedly like), when you could be making good music. [www.home-tapes.com]