"We like making songs with little noises poking out" write Carim Clasmann and Galia Durant in their charmingly spiky graphic artist handwriting. They have been productive and much-admired for some time now and this album represents their inevitable lift into the bigger spotlight afforded by Domino's currently infallible ear for marketably intelligent music.
And that's almost all you need to know. The songs are delightful, the rhythms are gently samba-styled laments and the real/digital instrumentation is meticulously, deliciously inventive. There are one or two really fine tunes and there are no duds in the eleven tracks on offer. The singing and keyboard playing is by Galia Durant and the production and glitching around is by Carim Clasmann.
If you haven't come across PSAPP before, you might have enjoyed JUANA MOLINA. If so you could imagine PSAPP as having taken some of that electronic/folk wizardry, removed some of the high gloss and made it more homely and whimsical. In the process they have created a delicate world of threatened urban places: parks, back yards and bed sitters in crevices with half-known names and disappearing histories. There's a restless transience linked to a deep love of small and beautiful things. Many of these things are drawn in Galia's cat-obsessed artwork (I think it’s Galia). The website and the video that accompanied the single are simply wonderful.
I find it hard to describe the kind of happiness this record gives me. Carim Clasmann's production is impeccably well tuned. The audacity of some of the samples yields a series of surprise treats throughout the album. Leaves scrunched, small things touched with spoons, bird sounds, toy duck squeaks, unimaginable insect scatterings, little splashes of discrete cymbal and tugs of bass find a balance and a witty conversation that fascinates and amuses. Galia plays a simple keyboard, with deft confidence.
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On "New Rubbers" at track five the whole thing bubbles up into one of the years' heartbreakingly best new songs. The tragic lilt to Galia's voice is underpinned by tiny additions of sampled sound: there's a violin and a perfect shifting sequence of simple keyboard harmony that drops in as the tune proceeds to an emotional highpoint at precisely 2 minutes 2 seconds. But, amazingly, the song itself is topped four tracks later by the devastating melodic triumph of "Make Up" with it's tenderly played piano part (very slightly out of tune on one note?). Despite it's self imposed minimalism "Make Up" is actually the great and timeless kind of song that could be adopted and used by one of the big cheese commercial stars in search of career enhancement. On this recording it sounds perfect just as it is.
www.psapp.net
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