Delicate Noise: Filmezza
Lens Records
Filmezza could very easily pass for a great lost Boards of Canada album—in other words, sui generis it ain't. Those trademark children's voices echo throughout many of the release's seventeen tracks, and though Mark Andrushko admits to influences like Alphaville, Men Without Hats, and Depeche Mode, it's clearly the Warp duo that has exerted the greatest impact on the Delicate Noise sound. As long-time BoC devotees already know, the style of music in question exudes the nostalgic aura of faded colour photographs or 16mm home movies taken on carefree summer afternoons at the beach (driving the point home, one of Filmezza's tracks is even titled “Polaroid Picture Taking”).
Having registered that little detail, it must also needs be said that Filmezza, the follow-up to Delicate Noise's 2006 debut Diversion, is a more-than-enjoyable, hour-long collection of atmospheric, emotive electronica. So even if “Butterfly Envy” does traffic in signature BoC moves—analogue synthesizer haze, voice samples, laid-back hip-hop beats—the tune isn't any less enjoyable for doing so, and there's also no point denying the serenading beauty of “Roundlake Beach” either. “Beware of Digital Children” and “The Children Are Back... Let's Hide” ooze the kind of a trippy wooziness one experiences after ingesting one acid tablet too many. The Delicate Noise sound grows slightly more exotic, epic, and, yes, entrancing too during “Tokyo Big Sight,” and “Lush and Coated With Words and Birds” takes the album out on five minutes of beatific bliss. Andrushko's nicely sequenced the album's too, with longer tracks rubbing shoulders with a requisite number of minute-long interludes.February 2010