Harlequin (Vinyl)

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'Harlequin' may be Alex Izenberg's debut album proper but it also marks the culmination of over five years of highly prolific writing and recording under a variety of pseudonyms, all of which have seen the reclusive young artist marry a frightfully natural gift for naive and romantic melody with a wild sonic adventurousness born of a genuinely eccentric nature.

Izenberg's earliest recordings invoke the feel of Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, Van Dyke Parks and even Elton John in scruffy miniature and the familiar specter of those titans of 70s songwriting remain here in timeless moments such as the soaring chorus of "To Move On" and "Grace"'s elegant lilt but they are distorted, warped and corrupted until they sound something new and deeply peculiar.

As an artist born in the early 1990s, Izenberg's listening habits are online - voracious and diverse -and the sonics of his own music bear this out. 'Harlequin' is almost a study in distraction - a restless, feverish dream-sequence which variously invokes Scott Walker's obtuse, off-kilter worlds of sound, Simon and Garfunkel's psychedelic yet practical string arrangements, the vaudevillian pomp and preening of Wild Beast's early material and Grizzly Bear's pastoral early steps. All this is cut through with moments of total silence, patches of noise, found sound and countless dynamic left-turns and moment of non-sequitur.

'Harlequin' is a colourful, imp-like fantasy of a record, full of concealed charm and mischief - the personalities of its strings, the horns and the echoes of the myriad rooms in which it was recorded all coming alive as supporting characters in its winding plot. Yet for all this  complexity it is also still a deeply human and relatable record at its core. Very much a hometown record, it takes its cues from the way in which fiction and reality are at constant play in everyday life in a city unlike no other; setting simple, universal tales of love, loss, grief and confusion against the heat, haze, magic and madness of the Los Angeles of Izenberg's vivid imagination.

Standard heavy weight black 12" vinyl, housed in 3mm spined sleeve with Poly-lined inner sleeve and download card