Populous is Italian producer, Andrea Mangia and providing vocals is MC Short Stories aka Michael McGuire. This is Andrea’s third full lenght release which is an electronic pop dreamscape with shooting stars. The overall sound of the album is one of mellow electronic beat and lush vocals.
Populous – Breaths the Best (ft. MC Short Stories)
Video
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usPfHl_g9PI
The affair with the opportunities. The coming of age in
post- and pop modernity. Andrea Mangia could tell you a
track or two about that. Currently on “Drawn in Basic”,
the third album — released by Morr Music once again —
that the young man from Lecce, Italy, has published
under the name of Populous.
Whereas “Queue for Love” (2005) curiously broadened the
abstract-electronic foundations of his debut “Quipo”
(2002) with the coordinates jazz, folk and especially soul
(as an attitude as well as a sound) “Drawn in Basic”
definitely has become ears in any directions. This record
sails in a casual and cool manner on the great lake called
pop music. Andrea Mangia is both at the same time:
captain and stowaway, songwriter and sound-bricoleur.
His tracks are tricky and polyphonic but seconds later four
to the floor.
That’s the way of someone who has listened intensely for
a long time himself. Someone to whom De La Soul has
meant as much as the Smashing Pumpkins’s “Siamese
Dream”. Someone who has fallen in love with the
feedbacking guitars of My Bloody Valentine equally as he
feels today about the peculiar sounds of the synthesizer’s
pioneer Raymond Scott. Peculiar synthesizers are
assembled on “Drawn in Basic” as well, not as a cool end
in itself but for their warm sounds.
Just the title: “Drawn in Basic”. Basic like the
programming language of the same name, the translation
of analogue pop music into a digital matrix. Basic like the
self-chosen simplicity, the reduction to the essential thing,
this self-confidence. “Man overboard” is a shoegazing
melody, a hit on the fast lane, between indiepop and
disco. “Only Hope” equally is such a charming hybrid of
digital sounds and an analogue soul. “Days” piles up its
walls of sound higher and higher. Finally, “Breathest the
best” stays last year’s sparkling event: it was released
already as a vinyl single on anost, the little sister of Morr
Music, in 2007.
The melancholy to gloomy lyrics and their even brighter
intonation stem from MC Short Stories once again, also
known as Michael McGuire.