Larry Gus – I Need New Eyes

If anyone’s got a handle on life, you’d think it’d be musicians – right? Not if they’re Larry Gus, apparently. Convinced of his own incompetence and envious of his contemporaries, Gus is a hot plate of anxiety on his new record, prone to bouts of self-pity that are hard to swallow coming from a man head-hunted by DFA on the strength of his Myspace profile.

Take opener The Black Veil of Fail, on which he confides “the success of others just makes me mad, unable to act straight or ever think clear.” Fortunately, Gus’s bizarre, exuberant compositions tell another story. Assembled from samples fished out for bargain bins, his kaleidoscopic collages teeter thrillingly on the edge of chaos. Taking the Personal Away is pure DFA, like a world music remix of LCD Soundsystem’s Us v Them, while The Sun Describes sparkles with the quiet ecstasy of Four Tet circa There is Love in You. Chill the beans, Gus, you did good. [Andrew Gordon]