When I was a kid there was a cartoon on TV called “Mr Benn”. He was the quintessential suburban British man, pleasantly non-descript in his bowler hat and High Street suit. To escape the monotony of his uneventful day-to-day existence, he frequented a fancy dress shop where “as if by magic the shopkeeper appeared” (complete with a purple fez). Mr Benn would select one of the many costumes – a spaceman, a knight, a roman soldier – and would step through the changing room doors into alternative worlds of each costume and invariably the epicentre of incredible adventures. Now you’re probably wondering what the fuck this has to do with a Tofu Delux record? Well, let me tell you – I’m Mr Benn, and Tofu Delux are the shopkeeper (minus the purple fez I think).

I was minding my own business, hustling together the latest Daydream Generation compilation when a track called “Spin Spin Extend” landed in my mailbox. I’d never heard anything like it before – a dreamy reverb drenched construction stacking interstices of instrumentation and harmonic spacey vocals like a psychedelic teetering tower of sound. So much did it fire the fuse of curiosity that I followed the vapour trail of colour back to the Cozy Home Records store and downloaded “Bear Claw” in its entirety, and perhaps unbelievably for FREE.

“Spin Spin Exend” is a pretty decent snapshot of what to expect from the full-length record, but thankfully it’s by no means the only point where it peaks. In sticking with the Mr Benn metaphor, if this album was a costume then it would be a technicolour jumpsuit glued togther with wild bird feathers, weird flashing LEDs, and colourful frayed threads. The world you enter through the changing room door of your headphones is one of kaleidoscopic brainscapes, textural, explorable, and easy to get lost in if you feel like disappearing into your own mind for a while.

To get the full story of Tofu Delux you need to rewind a year to early 2007 when a message from Cozy Home HQ asked me to check out their latest band. The songs on their MySpace page were good and bristling with possibility, but they didn’t quite live up to the reputation of the “Barret-esque live shows that blow you away”. Fast forward a year to the present day and it’s like comparing a blossoming stalk to a crazy big fruit tree. I’ll let you walk the rest of that analogy home yourself.

It’s tricky to pick out highlights on such an adventurous project that is so obviously meant to be heard as a whole, rather than a sum of parts. “Bear Claw” is full of songs (even song titles) that cut through styles and ideas as often in the thick of the action as the transitional spaces inbetween, running into each other, imitating each other, fading and bursting like mad kids under a winter sun. For every great “song” song such as ”New Years Day” or “Children In Color” duly dipped in the effects bucket and hung out to dry, there is a healthy spattering of atmospheric instrumentals, or a sonic explosion like the brilliant “Trail Way Path”, and sinister orchestral soundtracks like “Mauk Boz” or “Centipede Wakes The Sun”. It might be a diversely rich album of musical textures, but at the same time it’s a big old melting pot and a seamless adventure of stages in flux that like I said demands to be devoured whole rather than in tasty bite-sized chunks of individual song.

Listening to “Bear Claw”, not only does it blink like a neon sign to show that all is well with the future of music, but if you listen close enough it’s possible to make out the unmistakable potential of a new young sound growing up from the ground. This is the kind of album that will inspire it’s peers to try and push their boats out a little further and take chances with their songs. It’s roots are firmly planted in the guitar experimentation of the 1960s, but it draws on the technologies of the present, fusing the two into something electronically psychedelic and organically chaotic. Here is a place where synthetic strings go hand in hand with drum & bass beats, where samples loop around unidentifiable flying objects of sound, and where choirboy singing soars across random bursts of backwards strangeness. Components that on paper should have nothing to do with each other interlock, mixing like oil paints and explode in your ears.

When you finally resurface on the other side of “Bear Claw” and hang your trashed jumpsuit back up on the rack, the first impulse is to go back and hear it all over again. With a little time and dust, the adventure becomes more familiar, the paths of the journey more negotiable, but still you feel like there are things you have missed that somewhere in the future you’re going to love hearing. And soon as that familiarity kicks in you find yourself telling as many people as you can about it, all the while at the back of your mind wondering where else Tofu Delux can take you…

You can find out at http://www.cozyhomerecords.com

or listen to the new DG single “Spin Spin Extend”:

TOFU DELUX – Spin Spin Extend

or find out more about them at http://www.myspace.com/tofudelux

CATEGORIES:COZY HOME, REVIEWS