Another debut release to talk up here from a new label out of Philadelphia called Broad Beauty Tapes, this one from Atlanta’s Nomen Novum, the experimental pop project of one David Norbery. First, it should be duly noted that one of the people behind the Broad Beauty label is none other than Colin Pate, whose group Remote Islands released one of the most unexpectedly brilliant pop albums of the past few years in Days of Heaven out on Stunned. With this in mind, along with Pate’s recent work in Ladies Auxiliary, I was quite confident that, from a label curatorial point of view, this guy could sniff out a decent pop album a mile away. Sure shit, after listening to “If You Look For It, It’s There”, my gut instincts proved correct.
Norbery is one of those omnivorous modern pop songsmiths, gobbling up kernels of electronic, sound collage, dancehall, hip hop, and pop music and spitting them out into something quite memorable. Sure, some of the vocal harmonies, electronic textures, and naïve lyrics spread throughout do bear trace similarities to Animal Collective, or maybe the experimental-hip-hop-turned-indie-pop of the Anticon Collective, but Norbery clearly knows how to write catchy, hook-filled and heartfelt pop songs in a very classical sense, which a cursory stroll through his previous recordings would confirm. I’ll openly admit that some of this borders on being almost too glossy for my tastes, but then I have to ask myself, “Why are you listening to this for the 15th, 16th, 17th time . . . . . without writing a single word about it?” The truth is, like any good pop music, this is just an easy album to enjoy, and I could easily see Nomen Novum gaining some above ground traction in a “Best New Music” type of way. If you can’t get behind the songs, at least you’ll have a nice knitted cassette warmer to keep your favorite drone tape snuggled up in.
cassettes and cassette warmers here
1's & 0's here
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