Looper's 1998 debut, Up a Tree, was a friendly and enjoyable album of beatboxy little pop tunes. Its breakthrough single, "Impossible Things #2", was a movingly understated love song, but it scarcely seemed the sort of material that would justify Looper frontman/Belle and Sebastian bassist Stuart David's departure from his "day job" band.
With The Geometrid, Looper's strengths are more obvious. For Stuart David, who had grown tired of the linear nature of B&S's process, The Geometrid is an opportunity to take more aggressive control of his sonic palette, moving in techno-fetishistic directions that were anathema to the Belle and Sebastian charter. This is an album about technology, albeit not in the typical sense. While it wears the trappings of loungecore retro-futurism and new wave simplicity, The Geometrid has more to do with the "warmth" of technology and the increasingly essential comforts it provides.
There's a lot of silliness here. "Mondo '77" opens the album with horn blasts, a low-rent keyboard melody and a stacked-up shuffle-beat, enhanced with the sampled shouts of Francis (BMX Bandits) Macdonald. "Uncle Ray" pairs a tinkly jack-in-the-box tune with a sing-along chorus and seafood-addled conversation, creating the sort of song that people do the "wave" to in fast food restaurants. And don't leave the room, or you'll miss the fittingly brief but energetic tribute to David's imaginary band, "PuddleMonkey". However -- and this is important -- this isn't the sort of silliness that makes you think "What a criminal waste of aluminum." You'll be thinking happy, contented good-time thoughts.
The Geometrid boasts two particularly outstanding tracks. The first, "Modem Song," loops and layers a 56K modem's dialing process over bass, drum pattern, keyboard and regressive vocals. I've heard this attempted before, but here the idea is fully realized, the modem's dialing, static and handshake carefully cut and pasted to form a surprisingly beautiful melody. The vocals, deep in the mix, tell a tale of rabbits and rice-cakes. Even more striking is "Tomorrow's World", in which Stuart and wife Karn (who seems up to the challenge of her expanded vocal duties) contrast the reality of the twenty-first century with the futuristic hopes and predictions of the mid-twentieth. Brain-tickling harmonics and a solid-state melody hint at the gleaming white, ultra-clean space station decor we all assumed would be the state of interior decorating circa 2001.
Though he's taken a more technological route, Stuart David has retained a talent for illustrating afterthoughts and eccentric, half-formed notions. He's skilled at connecting with the listener's emotions, which is fortunate; as the robot in "My Robot" proves, technology alone can sometimes let you down.
