Video-game disco? MIDI Cerrone demos? This is precious stuff but very, very catchy, almost disarmingly so. Skiba is a 19-year-old Polish kid from what I gather, just out of high school, and he’s got a patient sense of build, never too anxious to prove how clever he is. The sound palette is pretty 8-bit, but there’s always one element in the song that sounds dizzingly acoustic by contrast: the ride cymbal taps on disco-funk a-side “Safari Jazz”; the rhythm guitar scratches on “Violet Carnation,” which is “Supernature” meets the theme from NES’s Ghosts and Goblins; the obviously digital runs of piano on horror-disco track “The Fog.” I don’t think this stuff would work too well in a club setting alongside bigger-sounding tracks, and the ornamentation is a little too new-sounding to fit entirely into neo-italo stuff that’s happening now (though the title track would disagree with me). That said, consider me charmed.

Terranova / TNT 82876870531
[Listen]
[Nick Sylvester]