No Need To Be Downhearted

05/09/2007 8:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Rob O'Connor

Music is mostly made by weirdoes. It’s what makes it interesting. Left to accountants, love would be just a four-letter word and music a series of twelve notes repeated until the cash register goes ca-ching. Wait, I’ve just described the radio! Elsewhere in the universe, the Electric Soft Parade, whose destiny is controlled by Brighton, UK brothers Tom and Alex White, get plenty weird on this Do-It-Yourself collection of mechanical beats, fuzzy analog synths, distorto-guitars and trippy song patterns that make something like “Woken By A Kiss” or “If That’s the Case, Then I Don’t Know” feel less like tunes than field trips to other galaxies. Downhearted is their third album, following up on last year’s The Human Body EP. It rolls out as a complex meandering through these alternate worlds where an acoustic ballad like “Shore Song” finds an electric plug in the middle of a wheatfield and “Misunderstanding” suddenly comes shuttling through as if there’s still an AM radio out there worth listening to.