Send "Psapp " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Treblezine |
 A friend of mine, a dutifully loyal Red Sox fan, found himself speechless when someone told him, in defending the hated Yankees, "Without the Yankees, there would be no Red Sox Nation." He realized there is no argument against this age-old philosophical paradox of `without evil, there is no good.' In turn, everything good has a dark side. Psapp, the London duo whose eclectic music is made with toy instruments and various studio-produced stutters and glitches, are far too often dismissed as cutesy or innocent. I don't mind the fact that their music is adventurous enough to earn them their own genre tag (toytronica), or that their music has so saturated the market as to lose any kind of mystery. I mean, once one of your songs becomes the theme song for a hit prime time soap opera disguised as drama / procedural, does that mean you lose all credibility? Massive Attack sure hasn't, so why must Psapp? "Cosy in the Rocket" aside, (aka Gray's Anatomy theme song), Psapp's songs have been featured in a host of other television shows, and have made a name for themselves for putting on entertaining live shows in which the duo throws handmade stuffed cats into the crowd. Okay, yes it all adds up to more cutesy behavior, but there's more to Psapp than that, as new album The Camel's Back proves. Leadoff album track and second single, "I Want That," is more Lynchian in its off kilter guitar chords, wailing sax and Galia Durant's sultry jazz alley voice than it is Wiggles-esque, despite the sound of bubbles throughout. The accompanying video is quite possibly the most disturbing thing I've seen with puppets since Meet the Feebles or the video for "Land of Confusion." Yes, there is something more menacing than a foam rubber Phil Collins chin. The strings and innocent keyboards at the intro to "Part Like Waves" are less dissonant than the sounds of its predecessor, but still decidedly adult. Imagine a Celtic pop version of a Simon & Garfunkel tune and you might get the picture. Either way, it's hard to get out of your head....full text |
| Musicomh |
| Four albums in and Psapp are still excavating the mine of instruments at their disposal. On previous outings this has led to well placed elastic bands or carefully placed household implements, their vivid imagination realised on disc. Now they're adding more conventional instruments, and The Camel's back finds them utilising a brass section and pizzicato violins. Oh, and bubbles. Not Michael Jackson's chimpanzee you understand, but a rather frothy sound that goes with opening track I Want That. This sets the tone, with singer Galia Durant keen to show how far she's come in the time since Tiger, My Friend. There's a lot to admire from Psapp's music, and what makes it so much more enjoyable is its refusal to conform to type. Even traditional jazz makes an appearance, as the closing Parker sets up a mini-stampede across the ballroom dancefloor with its increasingly joyous hot stepping. Equally rewarding is the duo's refusal to conform with conventional scoring, so that even the fifth listen reveals new sounds and clever miniatures of counterpoint. Each sound has its function, though, so that while their approach often comes across as frivolous there are intense pockets of emotion that pick their way through. Lyrically they also prove strangely appealing. "I have got to go, let me ride up on your handlebars" sings Durant, strength and fragility enjoying an uncomfortable co-existence. Part Like Waves is more affirmative, taking the rhythm we're used to hearing in West Side Story's America and making intricate string patterns from it, to extremely good effect....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Psapp ought to be precious (and not just because their “Cosy in the Rocket” gets used as the theme song for Grey’s Anatomy): they throw stuffed cats into concert audiences, make their own instruments from old toys, and have a whimsical focus on found sounds and avoidance of ordinary instruments and structures that veers towards the twee. But on The Camel’s Back, their third album, something weird happens: Psapp’s ramshackle, junkshop pop doesn’t mature so much as ripen. A complete listing of all the instruments and devices used to make Psapp’s songs would probably still make for interesting reading but the focus here is unavoidably on Galia Durant and Carim Clasmann’s compositional and melodic smarts. Any novelty provided by the fact that there’s probably a mechanical chicken used somewhere in these songs is strictly secondary. The slinky, syncopated “I Want That” gets things off on the right foot, layering steam vents, horns and honest-to-God guitar behind an ambiguous song about the joys of possibly improper flirtation (“I like a friend, I love a foe / Why’d you think you liked it?”). “I Want That” is Psapp at their best because, from Durant’s teasing vocals on down, it melds the dozen or so disparate elements they’ve thrown together and makes them work as an impeccably hand-tooled song. It feels completely natural when the organ and other beeps come in on the middle eight or the repeated water-bubbling sounds near the end. “Part Like Waves”, meanwhile, marries their customary burbling, busy undercarriage to a conventional string arrangement lovely enough to give Durant’s lament at the fallibility of human relationships some extra heft....full text |
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