★★☆☆☆
Avey Tare, aka David Portner, is in the experimental Baltimore band Animal Collective and a dab hand at putting electronic music, folk, pop and psychedelia into a pot and brewing them up into something rich and strange.
That’s what he’s up to on Eucalyptus, his bizarre solo album, which is clearly driven by curiosity and intelligence, but is also likely to inspire a profound sense of irritation in the listener. Melody Unfair lives up to its name: the warps and flutters, out-of-time strummed guitar and Portner’s drawled vocals suggest musical sophistication, but it is indeed unfair that we couldn’t have a melody to go with them.
Backwards tapes and random crashes and bangs make Lunch Out Of Order, Parts I & II sound like something Yoko Ono might have come up with had she gained full creative control over the Beatles.
Accompanying notes claim Eucalyptus was “practised in the dark early hours of the California twilight” and “slept on under Big Sur skies”. “Tinkered with endlessly on a laptop while giggling at Youtube videos at three in the morning” seems a more likely creative process for this aural warning about the dangers of attention deficit disorder. (Domino)