On the cover of Javelin's album "No Mas" (2010), a three-headed, pink-robed bearded man in sunglasses stares straight out at viewers as he shelters an attractive, forlorn-looking young girl under his arm. Behind them, three gargantuan white tiger heads emerge from an iceberg that contrasts sharply with the cover's bright orange background.
This vibrant collage provides a fairly concise visual summary of the eclectic array of soundscapes found within the Brooklyn-based electronic duo's debut album. And while you cannot always judge a book (or, in this case, an album) by its cover, "No Mas" is the rare case in which the majority of the music manages to match the colorful extravagance of its cover art. The duo combines groovy beats with the kind of trippy sampling now common in the work of countless indie electronic artists to create an album that highlights the act's potential.
Newly signed to David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, the pair of stereotypical music junkies that makes up Javelin George Langford and Tom Van Buskirk have quirky mannerisms to match their album art and music. The list of influences given on the group's MySpace page includes "dollar bin dance records, transcendent amateurs, providence, '80s soca, bee pollen, regional dance music, local partying, New Edition, Smokey Robinson, junk shops, flea markets, endless loop tapes and cousinship."
Given this list, it may not come as a surprise that Javelin's concerts are loose, communal affairs in which the band broadcasts their music signal through an FM transmitter in hopes of enabling fortuitous interference from boomboxes brought by especially enthusiastic audience members (a policy referred to as "B.Y.O.Boombox"). For their part, Langford and Van Buskirk bring their equally colorful totem poles of painted boomboxes they call "boombaatas." In addition to staging mobile, battery-powered concerts and parties, Javelin has played at venues as prestigious as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Having already self-released a collection of demos entitled "Jamz n Jemz" (2009) in addition to two singles on the Thrill Jockey label, Javelin recorded "No Mas" with more sophisticated studio technology than they had previously had access to, resulting in what many critics have found to be a slicker, more produced sound than that heard in group's earlier work. (Still, no one would mistake their new music for pop radio.)
Overall, their debut makes a great case for the new band, quickly astonishing listeners with catchy melodies, tight grooves and kaleidoscopic eclecticism. Even if the quality of the album's tracks is somewhat inconsistent, the opportunity to enjoy the emergence of a good electronic band with the potential to become a great one is well worth the listen.
The album's first half sets a heady pace, introducing Javelin's entertaining blend of sample-based collage music and straight-ahead, often funky beats while veering wildly between jarringly dissimilar genres that are at best vaguely identifiable. The psychedelic '80s melancholy of "Vibrationz," the album's slick opener, gives way to the jaunty pop of "Mossy Woodland," followed by the Nintendo synthesizers and helium-voiced rap of "Oh! Centra," a song that sounds like Alvin the Chipmunk's complaint about a cruel lover who "played him like Sudoku."
Perhaps the highlight of "No Mas" is "Intervales Theme," in which a jazzy, Frank Zappa-esque guitar and xylophone melody emerges out of a rainforest soundscape before being anchored by a funky Motown beat and shrouded in eerie high-pitched synth lines.
The album's pace begins to lag a bit after the brilliant "The Merkin Jerk," which sounds like a spaghetti western soundtrack being played by Air. The distorted synths and frenetic drum beat of "C Town" quickly become monotonous, and the lamenting "Off My Mind" interrupts the album's giddy flow with depressingly weak and self-pitying vocals, despite some intriguing use of atmospheric percussive sounds. Unfortunately, "No Mas" fails to recover from this slump, and the remainder of its tracks are largely disappointing and sparse ambient dirges.
Nonetheless, the whimsical, genre-hopping energy of the first half of the album makes it worth the attention of any fan of original and adventurous pop music. These songs are representative of some of the best music currently being made in the electronic music scene, tying together a variety of current musical trends from trendy '80s nostalgia to psychedelic freakout music to lo-fi ambient sound collage in an entertaining and unpretentious package.