A producer/songwriter for hire who has worked with a growing bevy of left-of-center luminaries from
Lily Allen to
Marina & the Diamonds, Benjamin Garrett (aka
Fryars) first gained public attention with his 2009 electronic pop-infused debut Dark Young Hearts. That album found him mixing a kind of '80s-does-'60s singer/songwriter psychedelia à la
XTC with an utterly contemporary, DJ-influenced approach to modern pop. Begun in 2010 and infamously delayed due to label restructuring,
Fryars' sophomore full-length album, 2014's
Power, is a similarly quirky but even more ambitious concept album built around the fictional sci-fi storyline of a scientist whose invention of a fake sun brings about a nuclear winter. Working with producer Luke Smith (
Depeche Mode,
Foals), Garrett has crafted an album that's more contemporary in feel than Dark Young Hearts, with an arid, shimmery layer of EDM- and R&B-infused studio élan. Nonetheless,
Power once again finds
Fryars delivering a balance of stylistic influences, from late-'60s Baroque psychedelia ("Thing of Beauty"), to '70s electro-disco ("Cool Like Me"), to '80s new romantic pop ("Don't Make It Hard on Yourself"). Imagine something along the lines of
Taking Tiger Mountain-era
Brian Eno crossed with
Scott 3-era
Scott Walker, all produced by
Giorgio Moroder and you'll get a sense of the expansive sound
Fryars achieves on
Power. Similarly, "Sequoia," with its poignant and summery
Brian Wilson-meets-
Daft Punk sound, registers as both timeless and cutting edge. Some of this disconnected, out-of-time quality comes from Garrett's tendency to veil his already introspective baritone and lilting falsetto in the warm, electric gauze of a studio filter. It's almost as if aliens kidnapped
ELO's
Jeff Lynne and made him record an album at the furthest reaches of space and then beam it down to Earth. All of which is to say that with
Power,
Fryars has made an album that is cinematic, endlessly listenable and out of this world good. ~ Matt Collar