CONRAD CLIFTON - ALBUM REVIEW

Conrad Clifton - Picture In Picture 
Conrad Clifton - Picture In Picture

Brooklyn producer Conrad Clifton sounds like a hoity-toity guy with a summer house in the hills and a personal shopper to choose his braces and bow ties but he looks like a cooler, less douchey version of Will.I.Am. I'm a little late coming to this album but it's ten tracks of instrumental beats and breaks that offer something a bit different so I wanted to bring it to your attention. Kicking off with 'Vanilla Skyscraper', Conrad Clifton drops some mellow, slightly Oriental melodies which manage to skit around and flow smoothly all at the same time. The chimes that open up 'Crystal Handgun' sound like the 80s clock in my friend's parents house from when I was about 13 but the beats and melody are like something from the future. The woozy, drunken sounding melodies continue on 'La Da Dee (He's Hopeless)' but with the addition of some Cossack chanting which suggests Conrad may have played too many retro computer games in his childhood.

There's a hyperactivity to 'Blacklight' that is, again, inspired by early Nintendo and Sega soundtracks while 'Polaroid Pixels' features a weird, honky-tonk piano sound atop some wistful, early morning sweeps that only last for a minute or so before 'Audition Subtraction' goes all dance mental on our collective asses. 'Obsessive Tendencies' is the sounds of Cola and Mentos reacting as filmed in slow-mo before giving way to 'Mourning Gold', a song so sketchy and crazy that it's likely to have been fed a diet of sugar and no sleep for about a week before they Conrad started to record. As the album approaches the end, we get 'Too Honest' which again sounds like the menu music to Street Fighter but with better beats while closing track 'Picture In Picture' has a cinematic, dream-like quality that transforms in to a chest beating, posing piece of theme music to cruise down the strip to. Clifton is not what you might expect and that's what makes him so enjoyable so I recommend you get yourself some of this to freshen up your ears a little.

More information: http://www.conradclifton.com/


Listen/Download: http://conradclifton.bandcamp.com/album/picture-in-picture

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