Sex, Death, Cassette

Rafter Roberts has been a producer for bands as far-flung as the Fiery Furnaces and Arab on Radar, so it's not a shock that his own music sounds like a compilation of the work of three or four bands (who sometimes seem to be playing all at once). Sex Death Cassette is Rafter's messiest, and poppiest, music yet; it plays like Roberts and crew threw an album of perfect pop songs on the ground, shattering it into bits that are just as catchy, and a lot more unpredictable. Though the album isn't quite as fatally erotic as advertised (somehow, Romantic Mortality Compact Disc just doesn't have the same ring to it), it does offer a fascinating push-pull between joyful songs that are sweeter than a lot of indie pop and spazzy songs that are more energetic than a lot of indie rock. "Love Time Now Please" pins down merry xylophones and guitars with heavily distorted basslines and beats; "Sleazy Sleepy"'s brass fanfares and sweet harmonies turn almost-nonsense like "you don't even need to know nobody at all" into an irresistible refrain. The ultra-noisy "Casualty of BOC" shows how good sticky-sweet melodies can sound with a thick coating of crunchy distortion and tape fuzz, and thanks to Roberts' artfully lo-fi production, the handclaps in "Cuddling Raccoons" can still be heard over cranked-up guitars and synth squeals. Like albums from other musical magpies such as Guided by Voices and the Microphones, on Sex Death Cassette Rafter works with a wide canvas of 19 songs. Roberts tries anything that comes to mind, from the wide-eyed "No-One Home Ever" to the sparkly, Beach Boys-inspired harmonies of "Breeze" to "Thunderclap," a piece of whispery pop that provides one of the album's few breathers. Rafter struggles to keep the momentum going on Sex Death Cassette's last few tracks, which feel a little more like typically "quirky" indie than what came before. Still, the album's collage rock is often dazzling, and never the same from moment to moment.