Album Review

Shawn Lee – Sythesizers In Space

• 17th Jul 2012

Putting Synthesizers In Space into the stereo feels akin to dusting off a record box full of forgotten treasures, rare grooves and soulful funk .

The very fact that these are all brand new recordings gives the album a strange quality, almost as if it doesn’t really belong.

It is a step out of time, and contradictoraly sounds timeless, joining the dots between Blaxploitation and big beat.  One song will have you picturing ’70s style TV action, sliding across car bonnets and the like, and the next has slyly transitioned into a homage to Fatboy Slim.

Further in still we are dealt a large dose ofglam-rock, before touching upon an MGMT prog-pop sound, and by the time it has reached its end it has again morphed into an assimilation of Zero 7, all the while blending effortlessly with the throwback hip-hop beats that sit alongside it on the album.  

The story goes that this album’s recording was based around the discovery of a “mystery box”, a vintage instrument found in a music store in Texas.

The sounds and textured produced by the musical oddity give Synthesizers In Space a psychedelic feel, built upon by keyboards and synths and completed by the live recorded drums captured on analog tape that give the album it’s warmth of sound that you’d get from a pile of 45s.

And the end result is an all-rounder of an album that refuses to conform, neither now, nor then, neither one genre or another, Shawn Lee has crafted an album as unidentifiable and as unique as his “mystery box”.

.