Greg Davis & Sebastien Roux – Paquet Surprise (Carpark)

American Greg Davis and Frenchman Sebastien Roux have thrown everything but the kitchen sink in together and crafted a quite beautiful, occasionally off kilter suite of glitch folk bastard electro acoustic pop oddities that if they could assume human form you’d want to hug them. Most prominent on their list of ingredients are acoustic guitars, which weave bend and exist under and around all manner of electronic and electric instruments. They are songs, but the structures have been lovingly distended and experimented upon, where the internal logic of the sounds informs what happens next rather than any notion of form or expectation. And this freedom makes for some really interesting and agreeable compositional decisions. And though initially it may seem to the contrary, it really has been carefully and quite subtly crafted as it can not be possible to layer this amount of disparate sounds and textures together even if you are some sort of slacker Brian Wilsonesque slacker genius -which no doubt these guys are. So alongside the odd moments of difficult music concrete weirdness you have the whispering vocals over gentle acoustic guitar. Yet before long their mischievous nature takes hold again and you’re back in the realm of gentle furtive spurts of electrics.