The Black Neon's debut album,
Arts and Crafts, is a strong, sometimes quite exciting release that successfully blends sounds and styles and comes out sounding unique. Heavily influenced by the progressive and electronic sounds coming out of Germany in the '70s (
Can,
Kraftwerk,
Neu!), the Black Neon also rope in elements of space rock, indie pop, indie techno, and straight-ahead rock. Welding hooky pop tunes onto repetitive, almost avant-garde structures is nothing new, but the man behind the Black Neon, Steve Webster, does it with style and a nearly perfect sense of arrangement. The blend of vintage electronic instruments and "real" instruments gives the record a very warm sound, and Webster knows when to let the songs drift into repetitive territory and when to rein them in and let the hooks take effect. A track like "Cast That Light" is a fine example of his skillful sound sculpting, and so is "Hollywood, 1, 2, & 3." Webster and the Black Neon show their versatility by dipping into singer/songwriter territory on the tale of love in the German Army "Ralph and Barbara," lay down some heavy rock grooves ("TX81Z"), and uncannily re-create the sound of '70s Germany ("Ode to Immer Weider"). They even get kind of epic in a low-key and squelchy way on the album's emotional high point, "The Ghosts." Only the couple of tracks that veer too far into too-traditional rock posturing fail; "The Truth," for example, rides a workaday riff for too long and his distorted vocals sound too
Beck-ish to be original. Still, these are only a couple of weak moments on a record that promises very interesting things to come from the Black Neon camp in the future. ~ Tim Sendra