Max Tundra: Some Kind of Monster
Six years is a long time to make a record. It makes me think of Seal working with Trevor Horn, Phil Collins recording every single drumbeat in a vacuum, and Metallica and Bob Rock ringing up 100 tracks of guitar overdubs. But as the amazing rockumentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster showed us, incredibly long album-gestations aren’t always solely the product of over-production, and, sometimes, even superannuated metal behemoths get the blues. If Metallica can get undermined by neurotic self-doubt, well, than, what chance does Max Tundra have?
Ben Jacobs —the 33-year-old, old-pal-of-Hot-Chip Londoner who makes hyper-manic electro-ish pop-music under the Max Tundra handle— is, like the above, a kind of recording obsessive. Slave to a ridiculously laborious process that finds him using an archaic computer system, time-heavy editing techniques, and a compositional complexity, Jacobs also seems to suffer from a kind of monomaniacal perfectionism that, surely, is couched in his neuroses. And, speaking of such, Tundra seems custom-built to be riddled by neurotic self-doubt: he’s small, balding, Jewish, and a confessed Woody Allen fan.
Nobody Snuggles with Max Tundra
Across his third, most-vocally-driven album, Parallax Error Beheads You —which arrives six years after 2002’s high-comedy Mastered By Guy at the Exchange— Jacobs returns to a number of lyrical themes, all of which seem driven by his particular personality. Whilst he’s plagued by both desperation and doubt when it comes to women (including those he casually stalks online in the single “Will Get Fooled Again,” or in his obsession with shoegaze pin-up Meriel Barham of Lush/Pale Saints/Kuchen), his technophilia allows him to feel amorous for the gear he anthropomorphises (like his beloved “Nord Lead Three,” and the camera/tripod his sings a valentine to with “The Entertainment”).
And, when not lamenting his perennially-single, personally-strange status, Jacobs often ruminates upon mortality (singing, in “Number Our Days,” “nothing happens when you die/you don’t leave your body or fly off into the sky/the deities you encounter were just made up by some guy”). When the album culminates in the 11-minute, guitar-solo-ing, largely-autobiographical cut called “Until We Die,” Parallax Error Beheads You seems to have, largely, been a study in life and death.
Max Tundra vs the Brain Police
Singing his tangled-up-in-self lyrics largely in a ridiculous, pitch-shifting, Prince-grabbing falsetto, Jacobs seems strangely self-mocking: his lyrical predisposition and sexless demeanour the antithesis of those dabbling in Paisley-Park-like funk. Musically, Max Tundra is less indebted to the-midget-dipped-in-pubic-hair than he is to the programmers of early-1980s Atari consoles, and to the ghost of virtuoso pin-up Frank Zappa.
Across Parallax Error Beheads You, Jacobs continually displays tendencies towards hyperactivity, time-signature-juggling, and impish mischief; such speaking of the countless man-hours that went into the record’s making. If the Tundra tone often speaks of aging computing machines, it makes sense that Jacobs can be seen as a symbol of a screen-staring era: beholden to immediately-obsolete technological advances, in love with his favorite pieces of equipment, and often showing, both on record and off, a distinct difficulty with concentration.
But, whilst Jacobs may've suffered through much of this decade, listeners are the ones who reap the rewards of his artistic toil. With its mixture of musical monkeyshines and words of deceptive depth, Jacobs has delivered a record both deliriously loony and strangely poignant, a disc that sounds both ridiculously robotic and achingly human. The six years, it seems, were worth it.
Record Label: Domino
Release Date: 20 October 2008
