The Busy Signals
Baby's First Beats
Sugar Free (U.S.)/Earworm (U.K.)
Hip-pop.
Don't know why we haven't heard this term before, but it's the perfect way to describe main
Signal Howard Hamilton's lo-fi, sample-and-breakbeat-filled pop songs.
Musically, Baby's First Beats scores big, mixing samples of shimmering guitar and
percussion work with cheerful-guy half-singing and laid-back hip-hop beats, not to mention the
occasional record scratch. It's the album every club DJ with a secret stash of pop records and a
sampler has been aching to make, and it does for '60s pop and mid-'90s indie guitar rock what
Beck's Midnite Vultures did for '70s funk.
Hamilton's source material ranges from warbling, Cocteau Twins-style vocals, to
Bacharach-style trumpets, chirpy exotica-style percussion, swirling, reverby
My Bloody Valentine guitars and, well, just about everything else. In most cases, like the
Phil Spector-style girl vocals, record scratches and dancefloor beats, he seems to simply be
generating his own source material, then sampling it. Or maybe he's doing the
Solex thing of sampling live performances or records
nobody wants. Or maybe I'm just dumb. At any rate, this is (mostly) good stuff.
On a few of the album's 13 tracks, weak lyrics threaten to rain on listeners' parades.
Witness, on the inappropriately titled "Constantly Awesome":
All my friends/ love to pretend/ they're always reinventing themselves.
But they all tend/ to stray and bend./ They fray and bend./ They sway and bend,
but you stay constantly awesome. Constantly awesome. Constantly awesome...
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
But for every one of these, there's a "Your suggestion box is stuffed with death threats,"
from "Show Me Your Gems," which, it should be pointed out, also contains the unfortunate phrase,
"The pretty colors and designs so lifelike, they practically kick your ass."
So what's a confused pop-dance hipster to do?
Skip ahead to the slow, dreamy closer, "Ladies and Germs," — by itself worth the price
of admission — tip your head back, close your eyes and drop out.
— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)
