I never quite understood the popularity of Pocahaunted and I was pretty underwhelmed by the LA Vampires/Zola Jesus collaboration last year, so I figured it was pretty safe to conclude that Amanda Brown's artistry just wasn't for me.  However, a helpful acquaintance recently sent me a link to this very amusing and heavily stylized video and I now realize that I was far too premature in my dismissal. So Unreal twists pop music into something truly weird, wonderful, and unique during its strongest moments despite being somewhat inconsistent and a bit narrow.
Brown and her ingenious co-conspirator Sam Meringue (Matrix Metals) seem to have an intuitive understanding of some very important truths that many underground/experimental musicians tend to overlook.  For example, bleeps, bloops, burbles, squiggles, tape manipulations, and general mindfuckery are a hell of a lot more appealing when they are couched within a song that also offers a strong hook or a cool groove.  Also, innovative music can still be kitschy, fun, and sexy. So Unreal offers all of those things, which makes it (mostly) an instantly gratifying and memorable effort despite the fact that much of it sounds so aggressively wrong.  Everything sounds warped, submerged, slowed down, deliberately plodding, too muddy, or too trebly:  the overall aesthetic seems to be "sun-warped '80s pop record (probably the 12" remix version) misremembered through a fog of barbiturates." Dub is also a strong reference point though, particularly in the bass lines, faux-horns, and the duo's fondness for panning and other studio enhancements.
However, the alchemy involved in making something likable out of a stew of deliberately warped sounds, lumbering/dated drum machine beats, and cheesy factory synthesizers is quite complicated and puts a lot of pressure on Brown's languid, heavily reverbed vocals to carry the songs.  They're not always up to the task (the opener "Make Me Over" falls pretty flat, for example), but her hit-to-miss ratio is fairly high for someone who probably never expected to be pretending that she is a sultry pop diva.  I was also very impressed at how well her lyrics fit the music, as the repeated "is it the champagne talking?" in "Berlin Baby" perfectly captures the "jaded and dissolute in an imagined '80s LA" feel of the music.  "Freak me and I’ll freak you back" is another particularly endearing couplet.  I'm sure there are more that I have not discovered yet.
The entire album is a bit much to take in one dose, given the limited palette, poor sound quality, and emphasis of style over substance, yet there are some extremely cool individual songs.  I was most fond of the lazily sinuous groove of the title piece, but "How Would U Know?" is also pretty spectacular–the underlying music kind of sounds like Wham's "Everything She Wants" being played at the wrong speed (which is a compliment, of course).  This is definitely a creative breakthrough for Brown–it is a welcome surprise to hear an aesthetic perfectly captured that I hadn't even imagined existing yet (early Bret Easton Ellis meets Hypnagogic Pop?).  I am converted.
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