Everybody will have their own story to tell about the boy who was the first in the class to buy (and even use as it was intended) a Commodore Amiga 500 home computer, but they’ll all roughly feature some boy who always sat at the front of the class, who always had their hand up and was inevitably the only person in school who had a dog that never chewed their homework. And whilst many of us were able to dismiss them as either too clever by half or demonstrably homosexual, their nerdish yet prodigious grasp of DOS and the fact they had shitloads of games somehow offered them a place in society. And were they able to surrender a microphone, a couple of MIDI ports and a full 500K of additional RAM memory they were indeed the dogs bollocks. The world was indeed their lobster. So imagine how formidable a force that boy would have been had he also been armed with a Piano Grade 2 and a weakness for the most sugary synth-pop of the 1980s – because this is ostensibly Max Tundra – the English multi-instrumentalist previously signed to Warp and responsible for crafting some of the perkiest fun-tronica of the current decade.
Putting sounds together in the same casual and dysphasic manner as a cheerful pre-schooler might use crayons, pipe cleaners and glitter-glue to replicate Leonardo da Vinci’s Sistine Chapel, Tundra builds up a frothy and eccentric soundscape festooned with lo-res bloops and buzzes, frenetic arpeggios, cheesy Casio keyboard sounds, bizarre time-signatures and vocals so terrifically whimsical that they were look out of place in 70s kids TV Show. It’s Rod, Jane and Freddy wired-up with all manner of crazy-shit and taking tabs like they were going out of fashion. Do androids dream of electric sheep? No, but Max Tundra does, that’s for bloody sure.
Of course, anyone pleased by the shrill funk-freakery of tracks like, ‘Orphaned’ and the fruity and fanciful shadow-boxing of guitar-meets-machine workouts like ‘Will Get Fooled Again’ are as likely to recall that much of what Tundra achieves has been achieved already by the likes of Scritti Politti, Nik Kershaw and Frazier Chorus. Not that it disqualifies it any. In much the same way ELO’s ‘The Diary of Horace Wimp’ predates the album’s signature tune, ‘Gum Chimes’, one’s only real option is to sit back and let this delightful retromaniac lead you on a wild and charming goose-chase.