nostalgia, ULTRA Review

The premise is almost a joke: an unknown singer takes tracks by rock bands and pop acts, writes new songs over them, and releases the result for nothing. What arrives is astonishing. American Wedding rides a famous rock progression and turns it into a story about a marriage that fails on schedule. Novacane is a genuinely strange hit about numbness at a festival, with a chorus that sounds anaesthetised.

Swim Good is a suicide narrative that never says the word. Songs for Women is funny and mean about a man who only plays records to get somewhere. Between the songs sit video game interludes and the whirr of a cassette being wound, the sound of somebody assembling this alone in a bedroom. The singing is unpolished and the production is by definition secondhand. None of it matters, because the writing arrives fully formed and nobody else was doing this.