Pre Flight Jitters is a rickety tinkering naive sounding series of compositions that feel somewhat thrown together. It almost feels like Pikelet has rescued a couple of elements from various genres and just fearlessly mashed them together and somehow they’ve made sense. It feels quite improvised, bashing away at wood blocks and shakers, accordion drones, glockenspiel, possibly melodica, and god knows what else, creating loops and adding new parts in a leapfrog fashion. She’s also not afraid of letting things get too atonal either, yet her sound palette ensures that no matter how discordant she gets it all comes across as endearing. Her use of voice is fascinating too, using it more to soften some of the harder percussive elements and provide a light melody, or even a drone, which she’s more than happy to manipulate, loop, pitch up or down, delay or increase the feedback. Her percussion pedigree with Baseball and True Radical Miracle is quite apparent as all pieces have a strong albeit rickety percussion basis. Given its improvised nature at times it struggles with where to go, yet the moods and textures of the music are compelling enough on their own. I’ve heard many people do these kind of intimate improvised bedroom style mish mash albums but none as good, or different and interesting as this.
Bob Baker Fish
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