Javelin’s debut album No Mas is a collection of excellent entries into the long history of music made into collage of found sounds from created elements sequenced together creating a unique track. This album finds the Rhode Island Born New York Based duo of George Langford andTom Van Buskirk working in the style of other artists such as Negativland, Teengirl Fantasy, The Avalanches, the album Sacreblue by Dimitri From Paris and innumerable Hip Hop and Dance music producers building tomorrow on what has come before.

The album is made up of two kinds of tracks. Most of these tracks are full songs tending to last a mix-tape ready three minutes where the diverse re-appropriated elements were cut away and then looped into a sonic collage typically over a very dance friendly beat and synthbass combination while the lyrical content will typically consist of a line or two appropriated from another song deployed to create a kind of soothing enveloping whole.

Interspersed with these full tracks are what could probably best be described as sketches; shorter songs ranging from a minute to two that don’t really develop beyond a sequencer experiment. Not to say that these are not worth your time, as “Merkin Jerk’s” minute and a half of great surf that sounds like an outtake from an earlier Fatboy Slim song, and “Susie Cues” sounds like it pulls apart pieces from the video game Lumines to generate a fairly dynamic two minute pastiche going in many directions but ultimately ending before a way forward is chosen.

While the album is quite rhythm heavy, with Javelin digging percussive elements from the graves of a million dollar bins it doesn’t ever seem to build up the BPM velocity or intensity necessary to escape head bobbing territory to launch into dance floor fillers. If some of these songs could get into the hands of inventive remixers, one hopes it could lead to a resurgence of the maligned and now long dead Big Beat genre.

Unfortunately, though the individual tracks are strong, No Mas doesn’t really coalesce as a whole giving the feeling that this would have worked better had there been an attempt to mix it together into a interconnected whole rather than leaving each song to stand on its own, clearly delineated from one another. Don’t transpose this weakness in the album into a weakness of the songs. The songs that make up the album stand up great on their own, even as the genres weave through many styles such as 8-Bit Hip Hop for Ducks with “Oh! Centra” to the AMAZING Dream Pop drop “Moscow 1980” to the Spaced-Out Slow Jam “Dep” that sounds like a 1960s sex scene set on the moon.

The strength of this Javelin’s No Mas is in that while it playfully teases from several different genres in full song or sketches it is ready made for people to pull the tracks they want into play lists for mood they want to evoke. Don’t be surprised if you hear some of these songs repeatedly over the summer and don’t be surprised to see Javelin pick up even more remix or production credits than they’ve already amassed but don’t expect to hear many of these songs next year tough hopefully Javelin will be ready for this and have more new songs waiting.

Category : album Review