Dwayne Sodahberk's latest for Tigerbeat6 pushes some of the glitchy electronics with which the artist is often associated to the background, allowing the simple pop melodies to rise to the fore. Though perhaps less experimental than some of his other work, Cut Open wins by being direct.
Honest pop music is tough to come by, especially in an age where every stylistic tick is played for some meta-textual inside joke that will usually cease to amuse anyone after six months. When I find a record with an honest but still fresh approach to squeezing digital production into the form of a pop song, it's always exciting. Too often the people with the skills to pull something like this off are too busy hiding behind not-so-clever references and shorthand for the work of other artists that they only seem to understand on a very superficial level.
Sodahberk captures the detuned, bedroom-produced pop sound in three minute slices about as well as anyone. The off-kilter instrumentation and touches of digital manipulation keep songs (that might otherwise sound too straightforward) a little off balance. Sodahberk always seems to be teetering on the line between needing to tune his instruments a little better and playing them just well enough that the sour notes seem necessary. The vocals are just burried enough to be mysterious, but not so overwhelmed as to be lost in the mix. And all of this is the difference between using an an imperfect aesthetic to create an atmosphere and simply relying on that aesthetic because it's all that you can pull off. It's easy for people to crank out tunes without so much as caring if strings are tuned, if drums are recorded properly, or if songs are mixed with an ear for balance. The production on Cut Open reveals that Sodahberk's choices are not only intentional—they pay off.
I imagine that work like this will eventually inspire a wave of commercial pop producers to try and create damaged but still polished songs for airheaded singers and posterboys. It's reasonable to imagine producers for pop albums dropping a record like this in an engineer's lap saying "I'm looking for THAT sound, but radio-friendly," and when that day comes, I assume that people like Sodahberk will already be on to something else. Luckily this album has guts and depth and the kind of authenticity that a $20,000 lock out rate can't buy.
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