Banjo Or Freakout – Upside Down EP

Banjo Or Freakout

According to his MySpace, Banjo Or Freakout allows himself to record all his songs only once and then carries out post-production with cheap Mac software. It shows, in that all his songs have a certain ramshackle charm buried under the layers of ghostly fuzz and noise.

And very pretty noise it is too – having made his name with several intriguing covers, including one of Burial’s Archangel (an interesting opportunity to discover what someone else thinks the lyrics to that track actually are), Upside Down is a charmingly lo-fi exploration of how far it’s possible to push the ‘pop’ template before it snaps. The closest reference point for Alessio Natalizia’s music is probably that of Panda Bear – all of these songs feel similarly aquatic, vocals swimming in between shifting layers of heavily reverbed guitar and barely there drums. Yet there’s far more at work here than any lazy journalistic comparison could do justice to – it’s there in the bellow-drone that underpins the title track’s wistful strumming, the skittering percussion and looped yelps of ‘I And Always’, the heartbeat that ushers in the second half of ‘This City Is A Fake’.

Live he has a reputation for building songs from the bottom up, loops of voice and drums creating an indefinite, infinite haze; these recordings accurately capture this, the ‘one-recording-only’ rule lending a sense of spontaneity, of abandon, to the sound of an entire toy orchestra playing the same note at once. The final track, a remix by Allez-Allez, is an appropriate way to end – melding Natalizia’s obvious eighties pop influences with a clattering electro beat in fine M83/Neon Neon style, it offers one suggestion of the paths he may yet tread in future.

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