Label: Discreet Music – 07 Format: Vinyl, LP, Album Country: Sweden Released: 14 Mar 2022 Genre: Electronic, Rock Style: Abstract, Minimal, Soft Rock
Second LP of endlessly engaging lo-fi romance from Treasury of Puppies via Discreet, a more than worthy follow up to their FFFM debut..
The first Treasury of Puppies record was a mini masterpiece of spoken boy/girl vocals, scribbly diaristic electronics and garage punk attitude. It invented a palette for itself and stuck to it, making a classic first album statement that however intimate its scale was, felt maximal and definitive. Here the palette is broadly the same. We are back in their world of tape hiss concrete, broken Mellotron samples, bare-bones Beat Happening guitar and arch but yearning monologues. But now it feels like the atmosphere and intention have been dialled up a notch. And, on the second side the record opens up, speech becomes song and the heartbreak is even more palpable. The electronics are drifting into happy sad post-rock / idm territory recalling Arovane, Boards Of Canada at their most grainy or some of that glorious Aphex SoundCloud dump. The ‘rock’ elements are employed in perfect balance - slow two-note guitar that recalls The Door and the Window at their most reductive and rockabilly drum machines straight from Grotesque era Fall. And those vocals… There is a feeling here (the repeats elsewhere in the FFFM universe) of avant-garde radio drama. I have no sense of what public radio is like in Sweden, but I can only imagine that, like here in the UK, in the 60s and 70s Musique Concrete was created in service of speech drama rather than as an end in itself. Records like Lars-Gunnar Bodin and Bengt Emil Johnson’s Semikolon may provide a clue. Anyway I digress. I have no Swedish so apart from one break into English the lyrics are a mystery even though their delivery speaks volumes. Discreet themselves say: ‘Treasury of Puppies are in their lyrics this time paraphrasing and recontextualizing everything from Mare Kandre, Edith Södergran to Edgar Allan Poe and Britney Spears, creating a comforting albeit perplexing own little twisted universe’ If that helps.
While there are elements here that place this band’s music firmly in the Gothenburg lo-fi mystery zone, they have a totally singular world, as beautiful as it is uncomfortable... (Mint / New - with insert)
Tracklist A1 Jag såg ditt ljus 1:55 A2 Rotten Apples of Love 4:16 A3 Bränna, känna 4:24 A4 Skriv när du är hemma 5:24 B1 Koka en vit orm 2:48 B2 Dödens soffa 3:20 B3 Vidriga simulerade ängel 4:01 B4 Mitt stora nu 4:32 B5 En blick i blicken 2:53
