"It was a very obsessive thing," says Jonathan Pop Levi about the recording of his new album of warped pop music, "Never Never Love." "It took six days a week for 12 hours a day for four months to get it to sound that way. Especially in the vocals; if a computer could do a perfect impression of a human, I wanted it to sound like that, you know? Slightly wrong."
This new album by Pop Levi (his stage name; people call him Pop) merges Prince, Radiohead, The Flaming Lips and T.Rex into one oddball package that springs from a quite singular mind. It bears a slightly eerie, almost emotionally flat sound that is strangely compelling: Songs are muted and compressed, and the vocals heavily treated to create a psychedelic sound that fuels the imagination.
One standout is "Mai's Space," which stretches a melody reminiscent of 1950s doo-wop over a robotic skeleton to create a bare piece of electronic singalong pop. A restrained and manipulated voice give the song's joyful melody an unworldly texture that is so weird, yet so right.