What is a female voice doing at the bottom of a volcano? Keep this famous question in mind as you ride through the Cheap Poet's enchanted twilight kingdom. Peer down your horse's mane as pits of whimsy open up below the telegraphic paths… chuckling caves of teddy bear chaos roll out their tongues in red carpet welcome… get your neo-krautrock fix right here, with the bipolar beats and the binocular bats and also the polar bears juggling the helicoidal synth lines. Startling musical and conceptual juxtapositions, get them while they're hot but also cool as in cerebral yet never cold no, always rather sumptuous and lovely. Who needs drugs when you have a poet that knows how to tickle your psyche. Never predictable, never linear, more turns of the screw than early Coen Brothers plots. If only early Stereolab used toy harps instead of vintage synthetizers and had employed their antennas to catch more Rimbaudian Illuminations than cutesy 60's French pop… is this outer or inner space music? Same difference, The Cheap Poet is mighty clever with the boundary eraser. This is collage wizardry, this is our Hannah Höch. Do you ever miss that sense of ravishing puzzlement you got when you were a kid, reading fables and whatnot? The Cheap Poet knows of this heart-breaking blues and so, being a kind soul, deploys the cunning candy: wham! We're back in the 5 year old zone, lost in the waffle labyrinth and slipping on the maple syrup puddles, getting big laughs from the magpies. Better than a yawn, right? Not necessarily, see… here, you can listen to certain preternatural yawning if you pay attention… heavenly bodies dozing off, drooling aurora borealis all over your opalescent rooftops. My my, what a wild imagination you have there miss Poet… your exotic palette of misfit musical instruments is so scary I just have to laugh… or is it the other way around? Haunted by dreams where savage puppets play instruments shaped like puffs of dragon smoke… now pass me another peanut butter and opium-jelly sandwich please.
(Review by Eduardo Padilla)
