More
For the third Arp album, Alexis Georgopoulos expands beyond his synthesizer experiments and half-imagined compositions to write with greater concrete ideas. Rather having a blind allegiance to radio-friendly hooks, he’s looking to find connections between the pop music of Todd Rundgren, Brian Eno, and the weirder points of Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks when applied to an avant-garde adventurism. Georgopoulos\' deliberately naive artistic sensibility creates unlikely and unusual pop songs like “Light+Sound,” where Badfinger crosses over to Jason Lytle’s Grandaddy. “Judy Nylon” pounds the keyboards to sound like Harry Nilsson, John Cale, and Eno had joined together for a supergroup pop album in 1974. Brief instrumental breaks create a sense of space and silliness (“E2 Octopus,” “Invisible Signals,” “V2 Slight Return”) between the proper songs. The Cale-like oldies-pop song “More (Blues)” appears to exist as an island unto itself, while “Daphne & Chloe” has a melody that battles against ambient sounds and other bizarre production decisions.
In the three years since the last Arp album, Alexis Georgopoulos has clearly spent some time thinking about how to retool this project. On his new MORE, he settles into a more song-oriented incarnation that is sometimes unrecognizable from Arp's spacey ambient work.