- Lurid retro-pop performer Ben Montero is back. In the time since he was last on the musical radar he appears to have been living exactly the sort of champagne-sipping, yacht-skipping, slumming with famous friends in exotic, sun-drenched locales lifestyle that his first album under the Montero moniker would lead you to expect.
Now based in Greece, he knocked up his new record, the suggestively titled Performer, in Mark Ronson’s London studio with Ronson producer-protege Riccardo Damian and Tame Impala / Pond’s Jay Watson pitching in to provide the elements of his now reupholstered supergroup. In a strange side-note, music seems almost like an afterthought for Ben these days, looking at how his cartooning career has taken off in the last few years. His work, to my untrained eye, is reminiscent of various colourfully nutty things like Robert Crumb, or the drug-addled animal dudes of Matt Furie’s Boys Club. If there’s a link from this back to the music, other than the fact that Ben’s illustrations are probably paying his studio bills, it’s clearly a loopy, psychedelic one.
Psychedelia is a unifying force in everything Montero. His first album, Loving Gaze, borrowed liberally from all sorts of styles and retro influences, from the Beach Boys to ELO to The Beatles, but Montero dunked them all in the same sea of psychedelia.
Many of the same elements are present on Performer. Once again it’s as astute and ironic as it is an over-the-top astral-traveller. If you thought the extreme changes in his backing band had to have some effect, however, I reckon you’d be right. Jay Watson and Ben Montero already had a lot in common, but I sense his stylistic sensibility at work here, specifically his Pond and GUM stuff. Across the whole record there’s a lushness that verges on the overwhelming, tugging proggier tendencies into the foreground and shuffling the more finely honed pop craftmanship -the stuff that sounded more like oldschool Bacharach and The Carpenters- out of the spotlight.
I dunno, sometimes I feel really wrong about that assessment, songs like the wistful Caught Up In My Own World are definitely touched by pop genius and they do definitely make up for others like Tokin’ The Night Away, which is more reminiscent of Ariel Pink singing about schnitzel than Ariel Pink crooning a masterpiece like Only In My Dreams. If I had the gaul to send it back to the studio I would ask for something slightly crisper, cleaner, less self-indulgent and soaked in LSD.
Whatever, the themes of Performer are those of taking stock, contemplating love and loss, the good and the bad. At the end of that assessment Ben Montero, sipping an ouzo and looking out over the Aegean, adding up everything he is, well, he must be pretty happy.
- Chris Cobcroft.