In the Soup: Max Tundra's Unexpected Comeback

In 2003, Max Tundra told me: "I’m fairly insecure about my music at the best of times." Clearly, for the artist actually named Ben Jacobs, the past six years haven't been the best of times. Since releasing his ridiculous(ly good) Mastered by Guy at the Exchange album in 2002, Jacobs has been slaving away at his next effort. The years ran like rabbits, he started suffering carpal-tunnel syndrome, and found himself so derailed by rampant second-guessing that many assumed he'd become the Kevin Shields of manic tweelectro-funk, lost in the eternal torture of the impossible follow-up.

It's with no sense of small wonder, then, that I'm currently listening to Parallax Error Beheads You, the forthcoming third album from the tiny Londoner. The 10-song set —whose photographer's-injoke title evokes, for me, Alan Pakula's prescient mid-'70s paranoia thriller The Parallax View— is a lurid collection of hyperactive pop-songs on which Jacobs draws influence from Frank Zappa, Prince, and old-school computer-programming. Suggestive of its long, troubled gestation, it turns out to be a lyrical study in mortality, climaxing in a frenetic, autobiographical, guitar-solo-ing 11-minute opus named, no less, "Until We Die."

The folk at Domino, positively kvelling with marketing pride, are serving up a steaming-hot special-edition of Parallax Error Beheads You. Inspired by the line "a pint of chicken soup comes falling from my eye" from one of the many death-centric odes herein, "Number Our Days," they've cooked up one cockeyed idea: the 'kosher' format.

Thus, a limited edition 'soup can' version of the album will be released. By which I mean: an actual soup can. In some sort of inversion of Warhol, Max Tundra presents you not with a representation of the object, but the object itself; Domino offering a Tundra-themed can of heat-at-home Kosher Chicken nosh that comes replete with download-codes for the songs. The album will be unveiled, in both broth and non-broth versions, at various points of the remaining ought-eight around the world (October 11 in Australia, the 20th in the UK, sometime mid-November in the USA).

Parallax Error Beheads You Track List
1. "Gun Chimes"
2. "Will Get Fooled Again"
3. "Which Song"
4. "My Night Out"
5. "Orphaned"
6. "Nord Lead Three"
7. "The Entertainment"
8. "Number Our Days"
9. "Glycaemic Index Blues"
10. "Until We Die"