Back around the turn of the century, fuelled by a trip to Spain, the country of my maternal family, and a radio program on Sydney’s 2SER called Tokyo Take Out, I went through a real obsession with charming, lo-fi Japanese and European electro-pop. Obscure Spanish bands like La Monja Enana, Nosotrash, Spring and Beef were regulars on my stereo, along with more rockist Japanese offerings from the likes of Buffalo Daughter. This 7″ from a new Brisbane label – Disembraining – puts me right back in those quirky days.
Scraps is Laura and she’s also from Brisbane. That’s about as much as I could find in terms of biography in a half hour of internet investigation. The main point of Scraps seems to be rudiments. Rudimentary Casio beats. Simple up/down synth arpeggiators. Basic pop chord structures. Sing-song melodies sung in slightly off-kilter pitch. It’s knowingly naive, but put together with such a developed understanding of structure and timbre that you actually lose sight of all the parts and just surrender to the very clear charms.
Lead track, ‘Secret Paradise’ makes me think of a plastic version of Kraftwerk. Scraps repeats “A flashing light/Some smoke/A Russian spaceship” over the lo-fi electro pulse a few times before breaking into a crescendoed, wordless hook. On the flip side, ‘1982’ is a love song to a computer in a frantic waltz time while ‘Simple Mind’ heads into acid-house territory, albeit acid-house as imagined by a couple of very cheap keyboards.
I must admit I’m predisposed to liking this, for reasons outlined earlier. Love of a genre, however, tends to make you even more critical of new additions. But Scraps disarms any doubts quickly. This is pop as it should be, catchy, rough and throwaway in a manner that, ironically, makes it timelessly classic.
Adrian Elmer
