Most of the albums you hear these days are full of delicate chosen, worked-out and arranged versions of songs that have been written and fine-tuned with blood, sweat and tears. Fog, the eponymous debut from 23-year old Andrew Broder is not at all like that. Instead of hearing songs that were meant to be on a record, Fog sounds more like listening to a recording from someone who was accidentally in the rehearsal room with Broder for 48 minutes, while he was fiddling around with his turntables and all the other stuff he undoubtedly has there.
The record has two types of songs. The first type are sound collages like "The Smell of Failure" and the last song on the album "And Stay Out," which consist of nothing more than random notes for 5 minutes. The other side of Fog is more poppy, like on the single "Pneumonia" and the beautiful melancholic "Check Fraud." On both types he uses turntables in every possible way you can imagine. The intriguing thing is that the sounds that you hear on the record don't sound like turntables at all. On "Check Fraud" the turntables sound like an out-of-tune flute, while on "We're a Mess" it's a drunk drum rhythm. And after hearing the album for a few times you even forget that he's actually using turntables at all.
But is Fog more than a daring experiment in turntable expressionism? That's something that I can't say, even after hearing the record a zillion times. Every time you listen to the record you discover new things, and you're amazed at the skills of Broder. But when it comes to something like being gripped by the songs it's a difficult task, because of the non-coherent nature of the record. And while arranging this record in a more 'digestive' way would probably have spoiled it, the way it is now will probably not make you listen to this record more than a few times. But if you thought that turntables were only used for providing minimalist beats to rap music, listen to this record and be amazed.
1. A Word Of Advice
2. The Smell Of Failure
3. Pneumonia
4. Fuckedupfuckfuckup
5. Check Fraud
6. Hitting A Wall
7. Fool
8. Truth And Laughing Gas
9. We're A Mess
10. Staring At The Dashboard
11. Glory
12. Ghoul Expert
13. And Stay Out