A big up to our brothers and sisters in music retail. Many of the world’s greatest musical minds are to be found rotting behind the counters of its record shops, their slow descent into embittered atrophy enlivened only by the opportunity to casually abuse the general public.
As [a]Solex[/a], Amsterdam record exchange owner Elisabeth Esselink has bucked the trend towards apathy inherent in this form of counter-culture by actually making music rather than griping about other’s. With the follow-up to last year’s ‘Solex Vs The Hitmeister’, she has burrowed deeper into the mine of unsaleable CDs which she chops and samples to make her idiosyncratic music and emerged with an edgy melange of lo-fi experimental pop and jazzy time signatures with Esselink muttering curious stream-of-consciousness monologues over the top.
‘Pick Up’ is an unsettling racket, then; there’s a bit of The Fall in there, a nod towards early Beck and a hefty dose of the wilful rhythms of The Raincoats, and while [a]Solex[/a]’s vision is a little too intense for consumption in large doses, ‘Randy Costanza’ and ‘Athens-Ohio’ are touched with something approaching genius.
Most music lovers will be utterly bewildered by ‘Pick Up’; in the world of music retail, that’s quite a compliment.