Monostar

The Airport (The Music Cartel)
by Jamie Kiffel

“Every love I ever had made me feel so underfed,” sings Eric Palmqwist in a sentimental tenor, gracing marching drums and electrics that gently noodle around power chords. With steady, soft-edged digital backbeats, twanging minor tones rising on glitter-fuzzed guitars, spacey ticks, echoes and forlorn love pleas, Monostar evokes visions of soft-haired, prepubescent raver boys cuddling into knockoff ’70s jerseys, considering the timelessness of their flaking body glitter. “See the snow in your head every time you try to fill your dreams with something else,” Palmqwist gently muses, and with every repeating electronic blip and minor chord rising to a triumphant one of three glorious majors, you know he’s silently celebrating every astronaut Lego he ever owned, still pristine and reeking of bright, jet-molded plastic. As repetitiously basic as Jimmy Harlevi’s 1-2 drumbeats are, and as sweetly insipid as are Linus Larsson and Carl Dahlström’s weenie strings, even the jaded music reviewer gravely offers a heartfelt “I hear ya, man” when Palmqwist asserts melodically, “I hit myself real hard to make you understand how you hurt me… but you don’t understand.” Like machine-made plastic toys with only pindot eyes and curved mouths as their expressive tools (Legos don’t even have hair to complicate their features), The Airport manages the magic of extreme playability in spite of its bald, knob noggin. Both Monostar and Lego men smile, shine, and click brilliantly into place no matter what their emotion or how many times they’ve had their heads and feet jammed into a board of bricks. The disc is catchy, upbeat, and ingenuously complex, evoking the depth of feeling possessed only by mass-produced joy.
(106 West 32 St. 3rd Fl. New York, NY 10001)