Mistletone

On his second album, Australian bedroom dreamer Francis Plagne redoubles the wide-eyed wonder of its 2005 predecessor ‘Idle Bones’. A songwriter whose impatience with form suggests creative bi-polarity, he is unwilling to settle within one idiom. ‘Francis Plagne’ loosely slots into a trajectory of experimental song/sound art crossover that stretches from Caetano Veloso’s ‘Araca Azul’ through to Broadcast.

The home recorded fidelity casts his songs in an amber glow that recalls other ‘radio stuck in fog’ outcasts Ariel Pink and Lamborghini Crystal, but passages of improvisation and drone upset the pop equilibrium. On ‘Replace U with an A’, 1960s pop is cleft in two by percussive rattling that littered across the mise en scene, while ‘Arrested iin Vaslui’ is modular in its construction, tacking jack-in-the-box melodies onto bubbling noise. Plagne treats his records as jigsaw puzzles, with the melody of “Vaslui” subsequently recast for piano on “Maidenhead Before Grandchild”.

The aesthetic is clear from the song titles, which invert the English language, everything submitting to Plagne’s cryptic internal logic. Shifting from freeform freakout to song as altered state, the album’s enigmatic character floats close to The Red Krayola, whose influence hangs heavy over both the vocal delivery and lyrics. Concealing meaning through non-sequiter and surrealist juxtaposition, these songs are delivered in a halting, soft lisp, whispering floods of words that ricochet downstream like driftwood.

–Jon Dale, The Wire, 11/2007