Used Alien Mind, The Placement Aside

In Used Alien Mind’s second album The Placement Aside, Mike Leporte’s one-man-show once again plays space lounge sound to perfection. With all the subtle blips and lo-fi burps and cosmic nuance, the work offers eclectic musicality. “Splashes of Color” sounds like robots building other robots whose purpose is to create carnival rides. Other songs lurch along a clumpety-clump road, but only the sense of escape is important, whether they achieve that purpose or not.

Leporte is trying to be more human with this record, though. He gets help from Pete Weiss and Robert Wohl; they collaborate in several tracks in a creative effort, throwing together every instrument in the closet, threatening with steady bass and a Moog, enriching the album with sonic variations, and at times adding a lost-in-the-woods feeling. Some of the songs are more down-to-earth, with guitars and beats, like “Your Sad Eyes.” It seems that midway through the album the band touches down somewhere in the galaxy, on some planet where no star in the sky above outshines another star. And the voices just talk among themselves, complaining to alien ears who do not understand and have to get back to mischief.

The talk is excessive, however, on “Soul Hit One Time” and “Dazed Mutations,” and at times the repetitive lyrics and echo of voices suffer by their own design — if the record has a downfall, this is it. Leporte chirps as if he is trying to surprise himself. And when he is really onto something in several of the songs, he doesn’t chew into it enough, keeping the motion bizarre in a hazy scheme. The real pleasure in this album is leaving the enclosed spaces of mainstream sound you know and trust for something more experimental, and to that end the work is solid and original.