Like most music critics, I don’t get laid very often, and I am a failed, struggling, part-time musician. When an album like Queen of the Wave comes along, it castes a dark shadow over my wavering musical ambitions, like a horrifying, never-ending scene out of The Masked Canadian Roderick Piper’s award-rejected 1988 film, They Live. Suddenly, the dozen or so tween-wave tracks I made last week with a microKORG, a guitar, and a couple pedals seem painfully insignificant. The dearth of effort I put into them now seems obvious, even to me.
I am overwhelmed by the effort Pepe Deluxé went through to capture the live performances of specialized musicians from around North America, Europe, Australia, and their native Finland in order to assemble an impossible collection of arcane instruments and gear. I sometimes fail to put on clean underpants before stumbling to my laptop at noon to open Pro Tools, and these guys are recording a synthesizer made of lightning. I can barely play tween-wave and smoke heroin at the same time, and these guys are making a three-part rock opera (!) with church organs, film orchestras, and a dozen vocalists from around the world? Nuts to that. They’re raising the bar way too high for my comfort.
The concept for the album is also too intense for my preferred level of mediocrity. It’s all “Atlantis is sinking, I’m flying an anti-gravity submersible spacecraft in 10083 BC, James Bond meets Hercules meets Duran Duran with Barbarella death by chocolate tipsy husky rescue me from the waves, whatever.” Then, as if that weren’t enough, they produced a series of “album companion” booklets to explain the concept and instrumentation, packaged the album in their handmade Alan Moore-dropping-acid-in-their-eyeballs collage liner notes, and released an album trailer that looks like a Quentin Tarantino film reference. Seriously, look at that thing!
Even after all of that, I may have still been able to muster my half-lame creative inspiration until I discovered that Pepe Deluxé is donating all the profits from album sales to a charity to help clean up the Baltic Sea. Oh, and they made an iPad app. It’s all too much, man… too much, too much. I am going back to bed.
• Pepe Deluxé: http://pepedeluxe.com
• Asthmatic Kitty: http://asthmatickitty.com
• Catskills: http://www.catskillsrecords.com
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