Outer Limits Recordings - Foxy Baby (2010) [Tomentosa] // Grade: B+

Following the breakup of his short-lived—yet modestly acclaimed— UK dance-punk trio Test Icicles, member Sam Mehran retreated under a blanket of mismatched musical guises and cassette or vinyl-offered activity. The American-born multi-instrumentalist quietly and esoterically introduced a handful of (mostly) few-song releases for tiny imprints like English Spelling Bee and Not Not Fun under guises like Sam Meringue, Wingdings, Explorers, Flashback Repository and more-recently, Matrix Metals.

Outer Limits Recordings’ Foxy Baby (released back in July) is an 11-song collection of smeared hallucinogenic breezes that marks Mehran’s newest musical semblance for Not Not Fun and it may or may not have been recorded using some sort of boombox-to-VCR transfer method. 45-minutes of glam-y, “hypno-pop,” Foxy Baby plays with similar looped sublimity of (sometimes) label-mate Ducktails on tracks “Final Seduction” or the uppity “Bergheim,” but it’s two artists- the outsider glam-fizzle that came from Ariel Pink’s early work (try “Untitled” or “On The Rocks” here) and the (thankfully) now-collected sound of longtime UK artist Martin Newell and his Cleaners From Venus cassette pop, that Mehran seems to draw noticeable influence from.

Unlike some of the current lo-fi gazers placidly soundtracking sunsets for Sunday afternoons, OLR goes further, offering a varied and redolent genre-bent experience of pure headphone adventurism. Title track and (relative) fist-pumper “Foxy Baby” recalls Bowie’s prime 1970’s force; “Smoke Opera” bobs along with a driving Italo-referencing keyboard line; “Backstage Pass” takes a gloomy post punk dissonance which grows to thunderous riffage and, as you near the album’s close, it’s outrageous, Speed Racer-like car screeches that roar through “LA Skyline” and into “Driving at Night.”

Mehran’s label states that this concept effort, apparently recorded two summers ago in Berlin, attempts to follow the rhetoric of a metropolis-dwelling man that becomes obsessed with an exotic women, loses and finds her, smokes some cigarettes, then ascends into a “holy void of alien lights” to mark the night’s— and album’s— close. It’s with this narrative which sounds awfully like how some of us (hopefully) spent last Saturday night, that Mehran’s collection of codeine-soaked, sundry pop warps along wonderfully to a notable sonic success.

- The Holloweyed