P-Love: All Up in Your Mind

The pace slackened in the last year or so, but for a while DJs were producing albums with radio hits and real replay value. Moby’s Play was one. Basement Jaxx’s Kish Kash was another. P-Love’s All Up in Your Mind really, really isn’t. And there are a few simple reasons why not.

The first reason: It doesn’t live up to its hype. Early press for the album promised a mélange of styles and beats — “1980s Bomb Squad-style hip-hop to indie rock to easy listening to 19th century brass quintets to 1960s girl groups and everything in between”, as one ad had it. But it’s actually surprisingly bland. If there’s a hip-hop influence, it’s limited to the loud drum loops on most of the songs. If there’s an easy listening influence, it’s the overwhelming slowness of the 12 tracks. As for “indie rock” — well, there’s a whiny trumpet that sounds a little like Bright Eyes.

The second reason: It’s too slow. As a DJ who collaborated with the Montreal Metropolitan Orchestra and Medeski, Martin, and Wood, P-Love (real name Paolo Kapunan) was never going to come up with a bunch of floor-fillers. But his choice to give every song the same slow tempo and water-torture instrumentation (first a beat comes on, then a keyboard, then a trumpet, then a guitar…) was fatal. In interviews, Kapunan has credited this approach to his love for Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. But Drake’s ominous strumming and doomy lyrics sound like Motorhead compared to this.

The third and final reason for the album’s failure is the songs. With a few late exceptions, they’re just plain dull. But to be fair, they take a while to get dull. Opening track “Let’s Start at 58th and Roosevelt” begins with one of the whiny trumpets mentioned previously, and then a line of heavily distorted drums drops in. Fuzzed-out keyboards start tapping out a slightly ominous melody. If this was soundtrack music, it would accompany Pierce Brosnan or Daniel Craig as he slinked into an alley to trade a suitcase of secret codes for a case of unmarked bills.

It’s not bad, and when it’s over you’re left wondering what else P-Love has up his sleeve. Unfortunately, he’s wearing a tank top. Every song sounds like “…Roosevelt”. “St-Viateur Shuffle, part 2” (there’s no part 1, at least not here) re-uses the broken horn sounds and keyboard hookery. “Four Inches Per Minute on the DVP” replaces the keyboard notes with tremolo guitar notes, but otherwise it’s the same song. “Six-Speed Solipsism” is interesting in that the drum patterns sound like the title track on Genesis’s album Abacab, but that’s the only way that it’s interesting.

This approach and these tricks do finally click at the end of the album. “Isabella Frances” starts off like all the other songs, but after the first verse (such as it is — there are no lyrics on any song here) P-Love drops in a lovely guitar part. It arpeggiates and shimmers for a little while, becoming more and more gripping, until it sounds like a prime Brian Eno song. “Palisades (extendomix)” is just as catchy for similar reasons, although its guitar part could have grounded a Smashing Pumpkins single back in the 1990s.

DJs have certainly made worse albums than this; absolutely, they’ve gone in with lower aspirations than the classically-trained Kapunan. But dull is dull, and All Up in Your Mind only has a couple songs that will stick in your head.