4 out of 5

Label: Un je-nes-sais-quoi

Produced by: Various

Really, this is a 5 out of 5 – just an excellent selection of tracks from the poppy / punky oddballs who played at the ‘Hello!’ festival in France – excepting a dumb callout I’m going to make.

To clarify some before that, I have no idea what the Hello! festival was (as I’m just taking that from some media copy), and also, these are not recordings from that festival, but rather songs from the three groups who played, snipped from across the years of their respective catalogues. Grabba Grabba Tape are the punkiest of the bunch, with a sound that’s part Brainiac, part Microwaves, all no-wave shrieky synthy; Caliza is a poppier and quirkier version of Bats for Lashes or Cave In__ or the like, marrying a broad vocal range to laid back beats, but with a bit more compositional weirdness than those other named acts; Julián Mayorga is a solo madman, flexing in a way adjacent to both of these styles but quite poppy and pretty in his own right, often taking a boppy core rhythm and taking it into bizarre directions via wild vocal dynamics and inventive layering of guitars, keys, and more.

The sequencing here is pitch perfect, running out of the gates with Grabba Grabba and rotating between our acts, but not just cycling between the three – instead, pacing and volume are given consideration, and we’re given time absorb the styles, with relative crazier and quieter tracks being paired so the whole album flows as a unit. Quite impressive, considering these are all from different releases, different years…

So: awesome tracks, perfectly sequenced. What’s the issue?

It’s dumb, I promise, but – I went and check out other releases from each of these artists, because all of the songs are quite amazing, and while Grabba Grabba’s entries are pretty representative, I’d say they chose some of the wilder cuts from Caliza and Julián to better match the comp’s vibes. Meaning that if you picked up any release from these other artists blind, you might not be sold. That’s a nonsensical reason to dock this comp, but it’s subject to my disappointment when thinking I was gonna have some new artists to add their discographies to my collection. Woe!