Dan Edelstyn and the Orchestra of Cardboard - Germans in Space/Pyscho Town

Label: Blang Release date: 11/09/09 Website: http://www.myspace.com/danedelstyn Buy: Amaz Tripped out lyrics blended with a tunesome earful of melodic pleasantry, Dan Edelstyn and the Orchestra of Cardboard sound like the musical experience that ‘the clever boys and girls’ at art college would put on for the end of year exhibition. Music like this doesn’t happen by accident, it also doesn’t just get thrown together; making it seem as if both is the case is an art Beck took to high levels with his weirder experiments. And so it is with Dan Edelstyn and the Orchestra of Cardboard (sheesh, get a shorter name guys, please!). This is, undoubtedly, clever, listenable and ever so slightly... weird. But on the name: there’s no obvious cardboard audio production here folks; if that’s what you’re expecting you should move along right now. Instead you have musical goodness delivered by the usual range of percussion (including a massive return for the New Jersey cowbell), guitars, vocals, tenor sax, keyboards, vocals and my own fave rave – a theramin, yay! Research tells us that Dan Edelstyn ‘performs with The Orchestra of Cardboard, a backing band of life-size cardboard cut-out musicians, and that Dan and the Orchestra strut their stuff in front of backscreen video projections’. Really sounds like Beck to me! And the comparison doesn’t end there. The lyrics are... well, you know... difficult to place. On this world. The lyrical value of Psycho Town is pretty much what it says on the tin, and Germans in Space might have been libretto’d by someone whose head was spaced in a slightly different way than ‘the last frontier’. As a musical experience Dan Edelstyn and the Orchestra of Cardboard is a limited thrill, but I’ll tell you something; I’d love to see them live. Rating: 5/10