Twink, the Toy Piano Band! Twink, the Toy Piano Band!

Review of Ice Cream Truckin' from Disclaimer

For this album, Mike Langlie recorded a bunch of Supercute-style toy piano melodies and handed them over to a passel of desktop DJs for electronic refurbishment, for a collection of cheerfully streamlined technotreats that generally hew to the Twink credo despite their diversity. I'm not familiar with any of the nineteen contributors, but some have certainly piqued my interest. Ralph Muha ("Lemon Sublime"), for instance, who turns in the spacious sounds of a Sega Genesis game's soundtrack, or Mochipet, who chews up "Rocket Pop" and spits out the sounds of programmed misanthropy in a manner as unsettling as Venetian Snares or Datach'i. Replace the toy piano's infectious, searching theme with Neil Tennant's voice, and Milk Monster's "Slush Bunny" could be the best song the Pet Shop Boys recorded in a decade, while the distorted bass and splutteringly fast beats of Evan Morris's "Plastic Spoon" sound like an Aphex Twin approximation of a tweaker's nursery rhyme. Genially eclectic as it is, though, Truckin' suffers somewhat from having so many different remix artists jockeying to make their respective tracks stand out. The effort leaves little room for atmospheric downtime, making the whole endeavor a bit exhausting in its entirety. Taken in single-scoop shifts, though, it's as goofy and uplifting as we've come to expect from Mr. Twink, filtered through a prism of unpredictable interpretations.

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