The mysterious ones are the best, of course. Who is this Ballerine Nadiya, exactly, where is she from, and is she, like, 12 years old? Is she even a she? All I have to go on here is the cutesy Lisa Frank- meets -Salvador Dali cover art, an e-mail address, and 12 wistful Casiotone keyboard songs. It’s par for the recent course Singapore Sling’s been golfing its hole-in-one tapes on if you’re familiar (and if you’ve been reading Strauss-posts as religiously as I foolhardily wish you were, you might remember folks like Mother Ganga, Piper Spray, Sam Gas Can, Erasurehead. etc.) — vaguely nostalgic pop music with minimal arrangements, keyboard drum machine programming, wavy and warbly synth tones, and a mix that feels like it’s being suffocated by a wool sock. It’s… you know, weird, but it’s not really all that weird when you peek through the curtains of tape hiss and taste the sweet sweetness of pure melody in a shy and delicate voice that drives these songs like Pow-Pow-Power Wheels through the chalk-riddled blacktops of your childhood. Music that’s built to be gritty, grimy, fuzzy and rough around the edges that’s nonetheless crystal clear, clean and crisp. Pure purity. A fountain of youth. And damned beautiful too.
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