July 12, 2007

Matthew Dear

Asa Breed

7 / 10 In his Audion guise, Detroit’s Matthew Dear has techno clubbers eating out of his Palm Pilot. His ‘Mouth To Mouth’ track – basically, the sound of Martian spacecraft landing in Ibiza – was an anthem loved by new rave tastemakers like Simian Mobile Disco. ‘Asa Breed’, however, is something else entirely – it’s a pop album. Albeit a pop album that comes giddy with detailed digital patterns, Afrobeat percussion and the quicksilver trickery of R&B. There is effervescent electro-pop (‘Pom Pom’) and slightly uptight white funk (‘Don And Sherri’), but Dear resists categorisation. Reference points like The Human League or Hot Chip hardly explain doomy, acoustic guitar-led tracks like ‘Midnight Lovers’, which recall the avant-rock of ’80s icons The The. Tony Naylor

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