ELECTRIC PENGUINS

ELECTRIC PENGUINS
Goodbye From The Electric Penguins

Electric Penguins are a trio schooled in the broad church of electronic, ambient and general esoteric idioms. Their collective pedigree is worth noting - Mark Cummins has worked with associates of both the Floyd and Massive attack; Seán Quinn was previously signed to Eno and Roxy’s E.G. imprint and worked with Steve Hillage; Paul Murphy does TV and radio commissions in his own studio when he’s not moonlighting as a producer and fraternising with Bowie’s band.
The ensemble’s debut album is, as you might expect, an accomplished adventure in not-so-modern recording. The Penguins may be numbered among a growing cabal of reactionaries bypassing generic ProTools and digital trickery in favour of analogue bump and grind (Moogs, Mellotrons and Farfisas abound).

The opening ‘Gelb’ is a quite lovely slo-mo glide between Sigur Ros ice sculptures and Edge’s 1986 Captive soundtrack (specifically ‘Rowena’s Theme’), all breathy vocals and cinemascopic piano. It’s colour-coded counterpart ‘Blau’ is another beauty - slow Nyman-esque airs punctuated by sonar echo. The collective works best when the vocals are muted and the words ephemeral: ‘Supergirl’ boasts elegantly 80’s vocals and soft synth pop textures that suggest China Crisis by way of Air, ‘Lonnie’ is beguilingly moody (a little heavy on the vocoder mind), while ‘Soft Landing’ as its title suggests, is a sort of light-hearted High Llamas space-off stitched with Duane Eddy guitar.

The Penguins excel at atmospheres; orthodox song structures ill become them. For instance,
‘Transatlantic’ begins as a masterclass in German precision-engineered motorik and ends up as John Foxx era Ultravox robot pop.
Viewed in widescreen, Goodbye From The Electric Penguins is a triumph, rich in ideas and wilfully different.
- Hot Press Magazine

If you can tell a lot about someone from the kind of friends they have then I guess you can tell a lot about a band from their myspace friends. The Electric Penguins, hailing from Ireland and named after the password to one of Paul McCartney's sixties residencies, have Jane Birkin, Air, Karl Bartos (formerly of Kraftwerk), Kraftwerk (not formerly of Kraftwerk at all, it turns out to be a fan site), Sigur Ros and Laurie Anderson listed as their cyber pals. And that list will probably will give you some idea of what they're about:
vocoders, seventies instruments, quirky pop songs and downtempo instrumentals. In fact this is possibly the first pop album to be performed on period instruments since Lenny Kravitz 'went digital' a few years back.
The strict adherence to step sequencers, Farfisas, Mellotrons and the like makes for an interesting sound which can be sparse but is always crystal clear - a refreshing break from the cluttered sound that a laptop and a million plug-ins are often coerced into making. Although, as our Lenny found, whilst it may be a comfortable enough straightjacket for a single album I doubt whether this kind of instrumental Puritanism can last into a long recording career. The sound is reflected in the art work, a photograph in the decaying
house of man whose wife has left him, although it's not all cheesecloth textured doom and gloom – there are some genuinely uplifting moments here; all of the musicians have a flair for melody which the instrumentation helps to accentuate.
The standout tracks are the opening instrumental 'Gelb', all vocoder sighs and distant piano, 'Translatlantic part 2' (another instrumental) which is altogether more epic but no less lovely, 'Lonnie' which has a great chorus and single potential and 'Blau' which has one of the most beautiful piano sounds I've heard in a long time. Sometimes the ensemble and production sounds grating (yes, 'Answer the Phone', I'm looking at you!) but this is an engaging and promising album which feels like it has 'grower' potential.

The Big Chill www.thebigchill.net - Jez Wells
- The Big Chill

Originally envisaged as music without words, Goodbye From The Electric Penguins shows that sometimes it’s better not to rush headlong into anything too soon. As well as containing musical passages of intense beauty this compelling album has at least three singles that supersede anything the Irish electro-pop cannon has shot before. Vocalist Mark Cummins has been involved in the music industry while residing in London but with Electric Penguins cohorts Paul Murphy and Sean Quinn he seems to have found the perfect niche for his ambient, wispy vocal style that harks back initially to a young Bryan
Ferry or Paul Haig before revealing an upper register that evokes the icicle delicacy of Sigur Ros.

Stylistically the band have pitched themselves between the almost classical tones of Brian Eno’s more ambient work and the chilled-out pop of Air, as the heavily reverbed pianos of instrumental opener Gelb make way for the bouncy Supergirl, an inspiring single that gets the full lash of modernity on it’s vocoder chorus. Soft landing shows how a simple repetitive riff allied with a great vocal can produce a memorable moment especially when its gorgeous melody line is as hauntingly insistent as this.
Surprises abound throughout as the band adopt a tease mode when the toy box tinkling of Glass Random falls unexpectedly into the outrageous jazz chord of the year while the playful stomp of Answer The Phone is perhaps the album highlight, bringing to light what Bowie’s Low may have sounded like if he’d been on an ecstacy bender in Berlin instead of a recovering cocaine addict.

Coming from nowhere and bursting with supersmart ideas Goodbye From The Electric Penguins is a breath of fresh air in the overhyped Irish scene that celebrates itself.
TOTALLY DUBLIN - John Brereton
See also: Brian Eno – Music For Airports (EG) Sigur Ros – Sigur Ros (Big Cat) Air – Moon Safari
(Source)
- Totally Dublin Magazine