The London Apartments - Logistics & Navigation EP (Beggars Banquet)
2/5
By: Charlie Potter
Listen, I'm all for stripped back song structures, but this is just boring. And I'm not saying it's easy doing sound manipulation - I know first hand that it's not - but these guitars, drums and vocals all sloppily layered with a bunch of dirgey sounds in the background don't even come close to the genius of, well, Madness. That said, it's incredibly well produced, and the use of a heavy drum machine works rather well, if only the parts would change every so often.
It manages to be pathetically cute at the same time as being oddly creepy. But if only it were a little more on the creepy side then The London Apartments would be playing to their strengths - you see, the thing that makes this EP so creepy is its creator (Justin Langois) and his voice. Being the most interesting thing about this EP, I offer you not one but five descriptions of what that voice is like:
1 - Like he's trying to tempt a rabbit out of a cage by quietly singing to it, so he can steal it without waking anyone.
2 - Like he's just downed half a pint of whiskey.
3 - Like he's a big fat man auditioning for the part of a princess in a Disney film.
4 - Like an old lady, with balls, who has just been kicked in the balls.
5 - Like an old man pretending to be a little girl in a shampoo advert.
In the opening track, 'Streetlights Like Soldiers', Langlois sings of how, apparently, 'the street lights are like soldiers'. There is no poetic truth to this line - it's just not true, not on any level. There's no way, metaphorical or literal, that I would ever think of street lights as being like soldiers. If soldiers grew really tall and had lights coming out from their heads, I would think they were like street lights. If there were street lights that were the height of humans and had faces however, I wouldn't think they were street lights in the first place. That's just something completely different.
Sigh.
Artists in this article: The London Apartments
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