Pulseprogramming Tulsa For One Second

If you've never heard Pulseprogramming before, you're not going to pick up Tulsa for One Second for the packaging. They've won awards, apparently, but the sleeve looks like any other nondescript electronica album: grey, vertical charcoal lines and the band's name/album title in a shrunken, timid, self-effacing typeface (white and beige, both inoffensive, staple colours of the genre - nothing too exciting, heaven forbid!). Thank Christ for word of mouth! Can you imagine putting your fifteen quid into the lottery of buying electronica, where all albums look the same (a rack of said albums in the record shop usually being visually comparable to a book of carpet samples) and nothing is ever bad, just 'different' and 'atmospheric'???

Still, once you've put the C.D. into your computer, you get a woozy video of some girl's shoulder bobbing up and down to the half-decent opening track Blooms Eventually, which sounds like Low on an ecstasy comedown locked in a room full of samplers and rohypnol. Here Give it Here I'll Show You has a drumbeat like a slippery wank and not much else, Stylophone Purrs and Mannerist Blossoms (somebody's been to art school: well done!) is Serge Gainsbourg's Je t'aime (non plus) if you substituted the sex for ice-cream van jingles and the gravity-free float for a generic drum skip.

Pulseprogramming's press release mentions that they reference Boards of Canada, Matmos and Mouse on Mars, and if you like any of those amazing and innovative bands, I would highly recommend that you buy Tulsa for One Second, so that you can appreciate just how innovative those three bands are within a genre that is so accepting of the directionless dribble that Pulseprogramming think is adequate.

Largely Long-Distance Loves breaks through the mire, but only due to the fact that the comatose meandering of the earlier tracks is replaced by a driven coda that reminds you of Stereolab if they weren't particularly choosy about what they released. The last track, Bless the Drastic Space, is a drunken Low again, with a semblance of the beauty and a fraction of the inspiration, and then it's over. Not that you'll notice, as you'll be fast asleep by then, unless you've jumped out of the window to escape from the sheer banality of it all (and I recommend the stop button in such emergencies - it's the album that should be going out of the window, not you: life's too precious, kids!).

Oh yeah, I almost forgot the secret track: if you've ever seen the Dogme film Festen, try to remember the music box tune at the end. Take all but a small percentage of the tune away, and voila, you've got the kind of secret you never really wanted to know, like the fact that your parents still have sex or that your favourite Hollywood star was really an emotionally-crippled wreck.

Give this album to your friend, the one who smokes weed from dawn to dusk, and they'll say 'yeah, this is nice'. Then give them a strawberry yoghurt, and hear them say 'yeah, this is nice' again. Then head out onto the street, find the nearest crack addict and offer them a rock if they'll hunt Pulseprogramming down and chop off their hands so that they can never again waste anyone's time with such pointless, uninspired crap. Bitter? You're dead right: life's too short.