I've been sitting on this disc for weeks. Every time I pop it into the CD player, one of three things happens: I get lost staring at the incredible booklet art; I get swept away in the wonderful weirdness of the tracks; or some mundane chaos (like my new kitty Sneazy deciding to destroy yet another small part of my apartment) distracts me and I end up missing most of the tunes -- which is to say that Enjoy Your Rabbit is not a good disc to put on when you want to get some work done!
First things first -- the design of this disc is amazing. The disc's subtitle seems to be "Programmatic Songs for the Animals of the Chinese Zodiac", and indeed, the tracks are named after animals ("Year of the Monkey", "Year of the Boar", etc.). The booklet is covered with very strange and pretty solid color images of silhouetted animals and objects placed in odd environments: Vultures on the Pope's hat; a cowboy, dragon, moose and jet plane in front of a mountain, a bull, a limo and two hammers in front of a city skyline. Great stuff.
The music is similarly eclectic and equally indecipherable. Although hyper-glitchy noise barrages are getting pretty old by now, Stevens injects just enough stability into his tweak-fests to keep your ears involved in the evolving forms he's spinning. The sounds are mostly electronic, and while there are lots of the harsh, buzzy sounds we've come to expect, there are also plenty of rich, warm, fuzzy bits, singing voices, orchestral hits and even the occasional plucked string or trumpet note, all of which help make this a surprisingly warm sounding disc.
The result of this controlled sonic eclecticism is that rather than coming off as testosterone-fueled mania (which gets old pretty quickly), Steven's compositions present themselves as the work of a hyper, easily distracted composer with a great ear for timbre and an impressive ability to create viable large-scale forms from disparate and often quickly-changing sonic materials. He manages to balance abstract, arrhythmic sections with heavily pulsed ones, which goes a long way toward keeping my ears interested as the disc goes on.
The album falls into a weird space between ambient chill-out music and active listening electronic pop. There aren't really any songs here, although some tracks feature distinctly memorable passages. Sometimes Stevens sets up repetitive, drone-heavy sections that will lure you into dreamland, but then he'll suddenly spin out big, chaotic sounds that your deaf grandma couldn't sleep through. It's that unpredictability that ultimately makes this disc both a time sucker and a really interesting listen; I'm never quite sure what's coming next, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be good. If you've burned out on harsh, wise-ass electronauts trying to blow up your speakers, but you still have a hankering for fun, tweaky electronic music, then you won't do much better than Enjoy Your Rabbit.
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