Here's the context: browsing in Readings the other night, I became aware of the music playing over the instore system, reminding me variously of New Buffalo and Saint Etienne - a mix of digital and organic sounds with a girl vocalist singing/speaking the vocals over the top in breathy, pensive tones. So I checked it out and it turned out that it was the new cd by band called Ms John Soda; I hadn't heard of them, but I know their label, Morr Music - and once that second piece of information slotted in, I realised that they sounded like nothing so much as a female-fronted Notwist, circa Neon Golden.
I didn't buy it at the time, but a couple of days later (yesterday) did a circuit looking for it; Readings had sold out in the mean time, Polyester didn't have it and nor did Synaesthesia, but I ended up getting the cd at that old standby, Missing Link. They're a two-piece - girl sings, boy makes sounds (as often seems to be the case) - and it turns out that the boy is, in fact, a member of the Notwist...not really a surprise, I suppose. Having now listened to the whole album at home, I reckon that there's as much of Ms Kittin as Sarah Cracknell to vocalist Stefanie Böhm's singing, and the electronic elements definitely predominate more than in New Buffalo carefully constructed, gilt-edged, piano-based compositions, but the basic concoction is much as it had struck me in Readings: as the Morr insert puts it, 'an analogue idea of digital music, or precisely vice versa - loud and soft, warm and wide awake' (labelmates Lali Puna are an obvious reference point, and, to an extent, Múm - also reminds me a bit of Cyann & Ben).
It veers a bit close to lifestyle music at points with its polite bleeps, clicks and tones, gentle strings and murmured vocals, and overall sense of drifting blurrily along in that pleasantly melodic way without having much in the way of outright hooks or standout tracks, but is set apart by the Euro-disaffected vocals and the subtle variations from track to track which keep it all interesting - shifts in the tone-bed which form the underlying substance of each song and in the instrumentation which appears at the edges to augment and decorate that bedrock. This kind of electro-indie-pop is hardly new any more, and Notes and the Like strikes me as only a relatively minor entry in the genre, but it's still very nicely done and I wouldn't be surprised if it reveals more depths over repeated listens.
