4 out of 5

Label: Cutting Hedge

Produced by: Mark Gergis (mastered by)

An absolutely otherworldly set of tracks congealed together from some 2017 / 2018 live shows and ephemera surrounding them, Vicki Bennet’s People Like Us continues to astound me: how does one craft such continually weird and woozy music?

Often juxtaposing old radio / song samples with various library song-esque beats or effects, PLU has made a multiple decade career of finding the line between inspired randomness and melody, and balancing on it for entire albums. Early career had some noise leanings; after that brought in a tendency for humor – basing tracks around belch sound effects, why not. This stuff was already pretty amazingly dense (and catchy!), but at some point, PLU’s inherent nostalgia via its sampling took on a more directly emotional tone, and The Mirror is one of the most affecting expressions of that. Perhaps it’s the use of some very recognizable 60s pop, breaking through the groovy haze of cut up beats; perhaps it’s the thematic appearance of winter holiday-themed tunes…  Both of these suggest The Mirror as being exactly the reflection its title suggests, “looking” back at a listener, whereas much of PLU feels more observing from afar – absorbing and recycling sounds. This album is more immersive, and somewhat kinder; from the get-go, its a comforting hug of noise, hovering into view, pieced together in Bennett’s truly inimatable style of tunefulness from chaos. Its spell only really breaks at a couple points, when Zoetrope is dropped in as a very atypical, short, indie acoustic sounding singer-songwriter bid from (I think) Ergo Phizmiz, and when later album tracks like Boing Boing where some very harsh, electronic sounds interrupt the otherwise dreamy wave of radio-tuning mishmash.

While I think this are useful pauses or punctuations, these moments highlight that The Mirror’s general pace is pretty steady, and its tone (comparatively) calm; there are no real standout moments. This is not bad, just indirectly reminds that this work accompanied an art project, and has been carved into an album. I realize it’s not even clear if this is criticism, I suppose I just want to note that it was very, very easy to zone out to this disc – which could either be a positive or negative, I suppose.

The Mirror is a fantastic addition to the PLU catalogue, wholly sounding like none other than Bennett’s work, whole also unqie amongst her huge catalogue of productions, and acting as a pinnacle of a particularly emotive era of the PLU sound.