James Krivchenia
★★★★ Blood Karaoke 4AD. DL/LP
Big Thief drummer and Taylor Swift collaborator’s fourth solo album. Sounding very much unlike either Big Thief’s inspired indie-folk or Taylor Swift’s self-penned, worldconquering pop, Jim Krivchenia’s solo work takes from seemingly everyone, but sounds like no one else. A collection of instrumentals built around hundreds of randomly generated samples of YouTube videos and some of Krivchenia’s own MIDI work,
Blood Karaoke ought to be an incoherent mess. Instead, it’s a sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal sound collage, with unexpected twists and turns every few seconds, such as the elegiac piano which appears from nowhere on Caldendrical Rot, the briefly swinging guitars of Sub-Creational Reality and the opening to Scaleable Future Self Continuity Interventions, which promises Thriller before the song delivers a clatter worthy of Aphex Twin. It’s a breathless sensory onslaught, but a few plays in, moments begin to stick, although the element of surprise never falters. There is, it seems safe to say, nothing quite like it.