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‘Our Inventions’

Returning for their third long player, Munich’s Lali Puna fall into the broad category of what we like to call, ‘sound a bit like Broadcast’. While not the best journalistic effort, it’s a short-handed compliment for anybody sounding even remotely like our favourite Warp band’s fusion of fey melancholic pop, sampled psychedelia and electronica. On ‘Our Inventions’, out 3rd April on Marr Music, though, Lali Puma really sound like Broadcast.

More explicitly electronic than 2003’s rocky ‘Faking the Books’, Singer Valerie Trebeljahr’s half-whispered voice relays sad, bitterly sweet stories questioning the nature of modern progress. ‘Remember’ starts off with all the ad-friendly catchiness of a Play-era Moby before becoming the forlorn longing for a lost relationship, while the title track paints a world where nature has been subverted to the needs of technology

evoking, ‘The birds in the trees/singing our mobile melodies.’ ‘Out There’, a collaboration with Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Yukihiro Takahashi, concludes the album with, ‘their kingdom’s gone/Just ruins and plain desert/It’s all burnt down, we’re left alone.’ Which could leave a bleak vision of our banker- wrecked world where it not for how tenderly comforting Lali Puna sound. Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12