Andrew Broder
crafted
10th Avenue Freakout
as a rhythmic, up-front
electronic
-
pop
album, much less pensive and subdued than
Fog
's previous full-length,
Ether Teeth
. His impeccable sense of
spontaneity -- tremendous hooks sprinkled in among intense, droning atmospherics and lucid, loosely built drum machine lines -- is still very present, albeit far more out in the open and crisply produced, allowing for more standard songcraft and much less downtime.
Broder
's twisted and often absurd lyrics, such as "
Jesus Christ
is my
American Idol
/He's the brand new funky president" from the catchy
"We're Winning,"
are equally balanced by his moments of inspired illustration.
"Hummer,"
for example, creates a bleak, bittersweet feeling of numbed malaise, which
establishes very effectively, harmonizing with himself as he ponders, in a positively unaffected daze, what it's like "to be a sprinkler system in a thunderstorm."
is essentially
's moniker, under which he pursues various projects, all considerably different but, like
, consistently imaginative and never predictable. ~ Ben Peterson