Twilight Jubilee – Pete Um

Description

The new album from Cambridge’s pop-surrealist Pete Um, a world unto himself, but also a standard-bearer for the kind of heroic DIY befuddlement and unflinching self-analysis that Deep Freeze Mice, Mick Hobbs, Robert Storey and the Homosexuals minted. Pete Um is a lyrical troubadour and lo-fi electronic maverick. Um has supported Thom Yorke, received critical acclaim from The Wire and released more music than most artists have written.

Um’s sprawling catalogue is a beast that can’t be tamed or reasoned with, but it’s endlessly rewarding: time and time again he nails that going-mad-in-the-potting-shed-ness that is the historic, and perhaps eternal, English condition. Even at its most demented and disorderly your man sounds like he’s wrenching everything he possibly can out of his primitive keyboard-and-mic set-up.

While the influence of 80s UK squat-whimsy looms large, we’re reminded too of the synth-fuelled early-noughts of the The Soft Pink Truth and Safety Scissors, and, more than anything or one, R. Stevie Moore ? unexpectedly powerful and unforgettable songs emerging unexpectedly out of awkward, enervating loops and the more obviously pranky vignettes.