CD Reviews

I Monster | A Dense Swarm of Ancient Stars

Twins of Evil (2009)

By GUSTAVO TURNER | May 26, 2009

3.0 Stars

For almost a decade now, Sheffield's I Monster have been dining (and lunching, and breakfasting) off their brilliant use of an obscure sample in 2001's "Daydream in Blue" ("Daydream/I fell asleep amid the flowers/For a couple of hours/On a beautiful day" — you've heard it ad nauseam, I'm sure).

After years of pimping their old tracks on soundtracks, TV ads, and even a hit Lupe Fiasco single, Dean Honer and Jarrod Gosling are back with a really strange buffet of new antic confections. The duo seems to have spent the interim holed in the studio with their collection of cult movies and albums (sample titles: "Escape from New Yorkshire," "Lust for a Vampyr," and the Human League–punning "The Circus of Deaf") and their collection of vintage gear (a pop nymphette improbably tells her lover that he turns her on "like a Fun Machine").

This is a private funhouse world where Honer is still producing demos for a puppet-like Britney Spears the way he did in 1999 ("A Sucker for Your Sound") and the Twilight soundtrack is clamoring for songs about bloodsuckers that make reference to Hammer flicks and Carl Theodor Dreyer and degenerate into klezmer. There's also a vein of weird vaudeville, of both the Ray Davies ("Dear John," about a burnout accountant swallowed by his numbers) and the Mighty Boosh varieties ("Inzects," "She's Giving Me the I"). Expect to encounter many snippets of this charmingly odd album in assorted commercials.

Topics: CD Reviews , Britney Spears, Ray Davies, Lupe Fiasco, More

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[ 05/27 ] "A Natural Order," photographs by Lucas Foglia @ David Winton Bell Gallery

[ 05/27 ] George Orwell's 1984, adapted by Nick Lane @ Gamm Theatre

[ 05/27 ] "2012 RISD Graduate Thesis Exhibition" @ Rhode Island Convention Center

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