182. Max Tundra - Mastered By Guy at the Exchange (2002)

Now this is a weird one. This album sounds like someone gave Tundra (that can't be his real name, right?) the keys to a music store and told him to go nuts. There's dance music, pop, some chiptune stuff, acoustic tracks with pretty female vocals, all in less than 40 minutes. Impressively enough, all of this stuff somehow fits together--don't ask me how. The whole thing could fall under the banner of light and airy pop; there's nothing dark here. It's happy computer music! Particularly great are the two-minute dance/punk thing "MBgate" and the lengthy instrumental track "Cabasa".  There's even a song about French music video director Michel Gondry, titled appropriately enough "Gondry", in which Tundra pleads with the director to make a video of one of his songs. The whole thing seems to be simultaneously labored-over and tossed off, which is probably a harder thing to do than it seems. Not a track overstays its welcome, and if the album has a fault at all it's slightness--it seems to fall right on the edge of novelty music, as if the thing were in small part an excuse for Tundra to try out all these wacky things in the studio. But it's no less entertaining for all this, and definitely worth picking up (if you can find it for a reasonable price--used copies of this seem to be ridiculously expensive for some reason).

MY RATING: 7.4

Max Tundra - "Labial"