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

Review of The Broken Record from Disclaimer by Chris Willie Williams

Once again, Mr. Langlie puts the "twee" in Tweenk (as pronounced by Speedy Gonzales), but apart from his uncompromisingly innocent/silly approach, there's very little about The Broken Record to suggest that it was made by the same guy who made Supercute! Rather than a sculpture of toy instrument pop, this one consists of 21 slice-and-dice collages assembled almost entirely from old children's records, expertly rendered in styles ranging from wordless Soul Coughing/Mr. Scruff-style cartoon breakbeat (e.g., "Yippee Skippee") to calm musical ponds backing dada mishmashes of dialogue and narration (e.g., the hilarious "Three Wishes," which transforms a traditional fairy tale into something Terry Gilliam might've animated on Monty Python).

Might sound like an easy feat to blend children's songs together - after all, songs calculated to be pleasing to kids' "unsophisticated" tastes are going to necessarily be pretty basic - but rarely does the album settle for nursery-rhyme simplicity, using those snippets' often annoyingly catchy elements as individual Tinkertoys in lovingly complex structures. "Monkeyshines" starts out with the first three lines of "Pop Goes the Weasel" looped over and over without the titular resolution, but just before you start to feel like you're stuck in a particularly whimsical insane asylum, the song blooms into a grin-inducing wedding between accordions and beats that you can still skank to, and "Hot Diggety" is one of many that make a "genuine" electronic dance track from the typical woodwinds and percussion instruments that score these records.

Likewise, the inherent humor of the enterprise isn't what you'd expect. A less inspired musician might've tried to wring the obvious laughs from chopped-up renditions of the ABC song ("Alphabent") by spelling out profanities, or the dozens of songs about cats that are blended into "Pussy Cat," but in Langlie's hands, the former becomes a bizarre audition of illiterate singers and the latter becomes a spectacular, thematically-focused bit of jazz that would've fit right into a classic Looney Tunes piece like "The Three Little Bops."

The Broken Record is not for everyone, and the more-or-less constant spoken samples - though very funny - occasionally overwhelm the compositions, but if you're one of the "adventurous grown-ups" identified in Twink's press material as the album's ideal audience, you'll gladly give yourself over to Langlie's peerlessly smart cross-pollenation between Kid Koala turntablism and Sesame Street hooks.

Grade: A

See All Press