Dad Rocks! “Mount Modern”

Big Scary Monsters, 2011

Dad sounds a bit like Mum

• Dad Rocks! is Icelandic and plays in the Danish post-rock band Mimas, which accounts for how some of this record sounds, the opening title tracks is all rippling electronics, sombre cornet and a thousand music boxes all playing at once, Efterklang spring to mind along with Slarafanland. However, that’s only half the story, the other half concerns Jim O’Rourke and the avant pop burblings that characterise his Nic Roeg inspired albums.

• The songs are a wry look at life ‘Funemployment’ matches a flowing string laden coda with a song that centres on the search for finding things to do rather than trying to get a job at Burger King.

  ‘Downaging’ contains a hilarious acoustic guitar break that signifies rock music as he narrates a story of romantic failure.  The central melody is pretty and the arrangement circles it like the first frost nibbling at the petals of an autumn flower. There’s a great deal of charm in these gently self-deprecating songs; they maintain buoyancy with gusts of brass and brushes of strings. The titles of the tracks may tend toward the flippant, but the music is not.  You might not expect much from a song titled ‘Pants’, but what you get is some lonesome brass matched against slaps of percussion and gentle staccato strings, after a verse there is a blooming of strings and brass that sets up a frenzy of music that is like feeding time in an aquarium.

  ‘Pro-Disney’ advocates the cartoon soundtracks; over a sonorous piano he dissects the pernicious influence of films on the young. ‘Major Labels’ considers the democratisation of music via the tools like YouTube, yet never do the songs sound like political statements or polemic. The surface music is enjoyable so that even if you don’t pay attention to the lyrics the songs are still pleasurable.  Dig in and another layer altogether opens up. Not that it matters when a song like ‘Battle Hymn of the Fox Father’ could be mistaken for something by the National.