Halfway through the Dr Seuss book Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, our young protagonist bursts out of a dull cul-de-sac and into a Technicolor tent of music “where boom bands are playing”. You get a similar feeling listening to this album by surrealist US-Belgian duo Fievel Is Glauque, a jazz-pop LP that yanks you into its own world, full of songs scurrying about Seuss-ishly.
Supplanted by six other instrumentalists, the pair would record one take for each song, then another, then a final one with extra improvisatory details, generating as many as 100 musical stems to put into a final arrangement. Coupled with poetic lyrics that often rush by in a torrent and time signatures that change on a dime, it could have been a mess – and yet these teetering song-towers never topple.
