Leaf
2004
Tiger, My Friend
About This Album
Much like fellow Londoners Tunng and Adem, Psapp (the cat-obsessed duo of Carim Clasmann and Galia Durant) combine the idyllic laptop IDM of Four Tet and isan (whose Robin Saville released this album in the U.K. on his Arable label) with gentle bossa nova and folk-inflected songwriting, infused with their endearingly lighthearted personal sensibility. Tiger, My Friend, their debut full-length, impresses first with its whimsy: it's rife with the sounds of toy instruments (xylophones, pan flutes, accordions, music boxes), toy-like noisemakers (typewriters, door hinges, alarm clocks), and straight-up toys. Actually, who knows where they got all these squeaks and blips and whirrs and burbles and scrapes; the credits list a cat and a beer can, while the album artwork depicts mysterious keyboard-like devices with labels including "strum press wigglers," "surprise noise buttons," and "spectral weasel." For all their imaginatively goofy sound-harvesting though, Psapp's substance lies in their sophisticated and strangely sober songs, which are generally built on fairly traditional foundations -- softly plucked acoustic guitars, parlor-room pianos, stately string arrangements -- with some additional electronic tweaking and trickery, and always buoyed by Durant's honeyed, understated vocals.
Track List (try tracks 2,5,6,8 and 11)

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