Lawrence Arabia - Lawrence Arabia

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4...according to our Brian on Fri 11 Jul, 2008.

Lawrence Arabia is another of those musical zeitgeist prodigies who eats the surrounding media holocaust about EVERYTHING like the delicious hyperbole it is and spews forth lots of smartarse absurdist poetry & escapist songs about his daily observations through a mercurial & gifted haze of cracked folk pop. And I really like him. He's bloody gorgeous to start with, like an exotic actor with blue eyes and sculpted features but really, when yr this talented you can afford to be a BIT smug! He's got that same vibe as Sand Snowman, he fills his songs with magic and warmth and that's all you need in these troubled times! He's lo-fi too in instrumentation, like casio beats but the songs are clear as bells and quite graceful. I think his image is a bit of a gimmick but he's full of classic sounding songs, freakishly accomplished, yet tender and simple. David Bowie would be proud! So to sum up, a self titled, well presented effort taking in home made future-pop, wistful gospel-esque folk & countryish indie charms with an emphasis on bliss-out!

Tracks: The Mystery Lair / Thistle Tends To Stingle / Emperor Penguin Colony / Half The Right Size / Talk About The Good Times / Bloody Shins / The Joke Is In Your Hands / Hold Us Together With Sutures / Business Planning / Everyone’s Had Dinner With Rabbit / The Kind Of Feelings That Happen On Summer Beaches / The Thinnest Air / I Hope The Pope Makes You A Saint.

A former member of The Brunettes, Lawrence Arabia is the alter-ego of New Zealander James Milne and a huge talent to boot. Citing everyone from Jonathan Richman (both solo and with the Modern Lovers), Big Star, the Beach Boys and even acid tinged, prog-rock as influences, Lawrence Arabia is the creative mouthpiece for a unique talent.

His debut album is quickly becoming a word of mouth phenomenon and will be released in the UK in July. Upon hearing the record, Feist immediately requested Lawrence Arabia as the main support on her entire European tour this May and June.

The record is a masterpiece of blissed out psych-folk and layered harmonies interspersed with electro workouts on a par with Hot Chip and The Knife. Milne’s musical prowess is more than matched by his extraordinary lyrics that twist and turn through the mundane and the surreal via penguin colonies, episodes of Matlock and climbing Mount Eden on a journey to the heart of the human condition.

Album highlights include the electro wonderland of ‘Half The Right Size’: a seamless blend of disco noir and cacophonic noise. This sits next to the majestic ‘Talk About Good Times’, musically falling somewhere between Spector and Sinatra, lyrically the song is peerless; “We flagellate ourselves for our sub-standard performance at the gym, and drink expensive coffee, waste expensive moments and kid ourselves discreetly that these were really good times.”

The prelude to the album’s close, ‘The Thinnest Air’ is a sumptuous, Gram Parsons heartbreaker woven around the lucid dream “in Antarctica, where the rainfall is miniature, they jacked off a minister, at the end of his investiture” – all ivory tinkles and Ronettes drums, climaxing in the kind of duel guitar solos that harks back to Danny Whitten and Neil Young.

Milne grew up in the flat, mostly conservative “garden city” of Christchurch, New Zealand. He learned how to play guitar and wrote his first song at the tender age of eleven. He formed his first band in his mid-teens and they entered the national competition for school bands. But as Milne himself admits, “it was pretty bad. I was into Oasis. So I wrote Beatles-y songs which was odd at the time because everyone was into grunge.”

Things could only get better. And they did.

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