Elcifasu, Supracenter Evidence of Palms

At first, the music on Elcifasu’s album Supracenter Evidence of Palms sounds like an electronic composition. But when you listen to it, it sounds like much less than that. The band uses lots of electronically processed instruments and vocals and other sounds. The first problem, though, is that they use the same processing technique, which is something similar to a noisy distortion pedal, on the entire album. They should have turned the distortion all the way up, because the music sounds a recording of a third-grade class with ADD trying to annoy their teacher. Needless to say, this is not a promising combination.

The members of Elcifasu describe themselves as “complex pop,” but it doesn’t come off as complex — it sounds like they spent 22 minutes screwing around in the studio. And there’s nothing “pop” about it. Pop puts the vocals front and center, and even “complex pop” should offer an interesting melody. But here you can barely hear the vocals half the time. Which is good, because when you can, by pop standards, they’re terrible: they waver around and have no presence, and the melodic content is zero. The vocals sound less like singing and more like someone with no sense of pitch humming to themselves.

Certainly the way that an artist conceives of their work has nothing to do with the way it’s perceived, and if the album worked as a piece of electronic music, that would be fine. But it doesn’t work as either, or as anything else. It’s nowhere near being catchy enough to be pop, and as some kind of composition, it’s boring and banal. And it’s so irritating that even if there was something interesting, no one could bother anyway. They could sell it to the military psy-ops to scare out the next group of terrorists holed up somewhere, maybe — but they’d have to be careful, because extensive exposure to this album could be considered cruel and unusual punishment.