Chimpomatic | The Superimposers Review - Harpsichord Treacle - 2008

What do you look for in a new record?

The list might include a band's enthusiasm for the act of making music; being provoked by their lyrics; surprised by a sound, a riff, an unexpected instrument or chord. Anything that makes you sit up and think, 'I could never have done that, I wouldn't even know where to start'. Music making, though, has been liberated and people are no longer constrained by the mere inability to play an instrument. Who cares! Given a laptop, a vague rhythmic sense and the ability to sample a few bars played by someone else (possibly immeasurably more talented than you'll ever be) and you've got all you need. And thousands of you are at it.

The Superimposers are not musically incompetent in this way. They're just a little bit dull. There's no real surprise, no provocation, little of the unexpected. Sure, there's plenty of musical enthusiasm, but it's of the irritating kind for 'Fender Rhodes, harps and the mysterious Omnichord - a kidney-shaped Suzuki synthesiser played by strumming a touchplate'. I don't know about you but I don't think kidney-shaped synthesisers are a substitute for original sounding music and I'm tired of watching guys on stage hitting a multicoloured kid's xylophone or toy drum like they've just turned the music world on its head.

'Harpsichord Treacle' aspires to being the bastard child of The Beach Boys and Lemon Jelly. The music is determinately sun-shiny and warm, 'sound oozing from your i-Pod like treacle from a Harpsichord with plenty of peace, love and harmonies going on. Sounds delicious eh?' This is a direct quote from the band's promotional material and since Miles Copeland and Dan Warden, the duo behind Superimposers, released the album on their own record label: it's a direct quote from the band. Sounds delicious? Sounds sticky to me and just a little bit creepy. If someone turned and sold me their album on the strength of its 'peace love and harmonies', I'd run screaming for the Black Sabbath.

Miles and Dan are well intentioned, eager to be laid back and to grin inanely through a haze of good vibes. The first track on the album, 'Anymore' is apparently 'Glen Campbell-esque'. It sounds like the incidental music to a 1950's Western, which is no slight since I love 1950's Westerns. The rest of the album seems more unified, given direction by the band's self-posed query, 'How do they get that authentic 60's sound?’ A more pertinent question would appear to me to be, why would they bother?

It's not an unfamiliar problem, but listening to the eleven tracks on this album is like wandering through a sort of Musical Madame Tussaud's. They get the 'authentic 60's sound' by creating phonic waxworks which bear a questionable similarity to elements of the Byrds, through Serge Gainsbourg, the Kinks, the Mamas and Papas; all with added reverb and digital trickery. There's plenty of harmonising and humming. Miles and Dan 'met in an English seaside town', but they harmonise and hum like they're the Beach boys, goofing around at Baja. Then there's the sampling, every-so-often a few truncated bars of string instrumentals, looped and re-appearing as the tracks meander aimlessly. The ghost of Lemon-jelly drips off of many of these songs but there just isn't the same subtlety or eclectic humour. Dan and Miles may be musically proficient, talented even (unlike the lap-top crowd), but that doesn't stop many of the songs coming across as empty vehicles; showcases for the musical effects they have at their mixing-desk-fingertips.

The band's name was born apparently of their love for superimposing their music on other peoples and vice versa. They'd be better of spending less time 'plugging in space echoes' and instilling some conviction into the music. Some of the songs are brilliantly accomplished musical pastiche. 'Autumn falls' and 'Twilight' expertly mix musical tributes with seductive orchestration, rippling behind the vocals. But in hackneyed lyrics like 'I will make it all better' and 'no one said it was easy', I hear the band's own subconscious telling them to push a little harder at the musical coal-face.

If I were to pick one waxwork, this album would resemble Doris Day; remastered, re-looped, re-engineered by their 'way-back machine'. It's not a great resemblance but it's kind of freakishly there.