Review of The Broken Record from Opus by Jason Morehead

I'm sure I'm not the only one my age who spent many an hour going through their parents' vinyl collection as a kid. But unlike some parents, who might have had such banal artists as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan in their collection, my parents were much more eclectic. While some kids were discovering Rubber Soul, I was discovering The Imperials, The Blackwood Brothers, T.R.U.T.H., Steve Green, Twila Paris, and many other similar artists.

But my young mind was predominantly shaped by the likes of Little Marcy, Ken Turner, Uncle Charlie, and countless other artists whose names have faded from memory, but whose psychic imprint still remains.

That's probably why I find the concept of Twink's The Broken Record so intriguing. Mike Langlie has scoured thrift stores, garage sales, and Lord knows what else, plumbing the depths of vintage children's' recordings, and mashed up hundreds of such albums. The resulting juxtaposition is a kaleidoscope of puppet sing-alongs, animal sounds, educational songs, nursery rhymes, comedy routines, and showtunes that is simultaneously nostalgic, humorous, fascinating, and sometimes, a wee bit disturbing.

Langlie inserts some modern flourishes, like the scratching and hip-hop beats on "Mr. Magic" and "Riddle", or the acid house synths on "Boys And Girls". But most of the time, he just lets the countless samples speak for themselves, splicing them together to produce a collage not unlike what you'd expect from The Avalanches or Kid Koala. It's like listening to "Frontier Psychiatrist", only with Little Marcy singing how she loves her pussy. Cat, that is.

That's where the disturbing part comes into play, and Langlie plays that angle from time to time. Sometimes, it's something as simple as inserting a censor bleep or space into a song that you know is innocent. And yet hearing that pause, you can't help but wonder as to the prurience the content you're missing. Besides, the recordings are so cute, and intended to be so innocent given their target audience, that it actually gets kind of creepy, such as when Langlie loops the clown voice at "The Great Circus" into a torrent of hideous Pennywise laughter.

The Broken Record's novelty does wear off fairly quickly, however. Unlike The Avalanches or The Go! Team, who have full bands to flesh out their sample-based sounds and ultimately transcend them, Twink remains fairly constrained by Langlie's sound sources, as charming as they might be. One can only hear accordion-laced loops about monkeys chasing weasels ("Monkeyshines") sprinkled with dance house tributes to the three blind mice ("Three Blind Mice") and pieced together with a mash-up of wolf-centered nursery rhymes ("Grandmother Meets The Wolf") so many times before the kitsch factor begins to fade a bit.

But what doesn't fade is the feeling that one is getting a glimpse of an entirely different world of music, one as strange as anything the supposed avant-garde has to throw at us. Indeed, some folks might be tempted to scour thrift stores on their own, just to prove that Langlie didn't make these things up. But for those of us who grew up with Christian puppets singing us to sleep, The Broken Record will seem awfully familiar, perhaps a little too familiar for comfort.