It’s A Musical/ The Music Makes Me Sick

It’s A Musical
The Music Makes Me Sick
(New Music Club)

European love-in duo Ella Blixt (Sweden) and Robert Kretzschmar (Germany) are aiming to make us all a bit sick with their bonanza of styles. Checking off Scandi-pop, electronica and stage school applications, it's all a bit of a mess.
To begin with ‘Pain Song’ milks their instrumental vision for all it’s worth, featuring bizarre paint splats of virtuosity. Things get slightly better with the poppy title track, which complains of mediocrity in the industry while playing up to those apparent weaknesses with repetitive looping keyboards and Alphabeat style duetting. Irony going too far, maybe?
‘Lazy’, which makes up the album’s centre piece, is simple to its own detriment: inoffensive lyrics and a handful of piano chords do not a great record make. It aims for basic sweetness but comes up short - even throwing some trumpet trickles at it doesn't help.
Elsewhere we get unexplained jazz saxophone solos, and with ‘Bad Day’, a tuneless piece seeking purpose behind a supporting cast of horns. Sometimes the end of the world just can’t come soon enough.