Forehead Movies

A double CD of home four-track recordings by an artist with no widespread reputation (even in the underground) is bound not to pay itself back, commercially speaking. Yet such recordings are also often a good indication that the originator is doing things more out of a personal vision/mission than a desire to make an impact upon the marketplace. That seems to be the case with Forehead Movies, a collection of 68 instrumental pieces, most just a minute or two in length, though occasionally Elliott overshoots the three-minute mark. The performer/composer played several dozen instruments on these cuts, which are pretty fetching, though not brilliant, snatches of melodic wordless mood music. These often straddle the boundaries between rock, ambient, and soundtrack music, employing a lot of soothing textural blends with both standard pop instruments and less common tools like melodica, mandolin, marimba, xylophone, clavinet, kazoo, harp, flute, and found sound insertions. Even as such lengthy kitchen sink productions go, it's commendably diverse, though some of the songs would stick in the memory more if they'd been fleshed out to full ideas, and the percussion (as is often the case on home recordings) sometimes sounds boxily synthetic. There's not much difference between the totally unknown Elliott and the ambient/rock crossover artists who get praised in magazines like Wire, except that the production here is funkier and the mood warmer and less aggressive than artists in the field who tend to attract media attention.