Album: Manitoba

Up In Flames, Leaf

If The White Stripes prefer the raw to the cooked, then the Manitoba wunderkind Dan Snaith clearly likes his music as overdone as possible. Taking a sharp left turn away from the electronic pop of Start Breaking My Heart, his debut, Up in Flames features thickly layered textures that build up into a dense, psychedelic miasma akin to My Bloody Valentine, The Flaming Lips and The Avalanches: barely has a song begun before the listener is being pulled in several directions at once, forced to track the melody through a fog of echo, vast reverb and slurred, murmured vocals. With its opening glockenspiel figure soon swept away by rolling waves of drums, keyboards, horns and hums, a track such as "Bijoux" irresistibly recalls early Mercury Rev in the way it appears to teeter on the brink of atonal chaos before leaning back into harmony at the last moment. Another obvious influence is Brian Wilson, to judge by the vocal counterpoint in "Every Time She Turns Round It's Her Birthday". Elsewhere, the Byrds-and-beats blend of jangly guitar and baggy dance rhythm in "Skunks" momentarily reminds one of the young Stone Roses, until the free-jazz sax starts scribbling away over the groove. Snaith clearly enjoys confounding expectations in this way, following a relatively straightforward organ-and-guitar piece, "Jacknuggeted", with a brief but intense burst of digital bricolage, "Why The Long Face", the sonic equivalent of the death by a thousand cuts. At his best, this maverick sound-sculptor can equip a song such as "Hendrix with Ko" with a sleek momentum that's utterly irresistible. Recommended.