Solex
Pick Up

LA RECENSIONE

Solex for many, for a few Elisabeth Esselink, a young nerd in a skirt, former saleswoman in a record store in Amsterdam, in 1999 comes out with this album born from the intuitions that had led two years earlier to the quite good debut of "Hitmeister" where, however, the attempt to assemble and destructure the song formula to offer something different and innovative had provided only some interesting ideas and little more.

Here comes this album, for many her masterpiece, which to define "bizarre" is an offense. "Pick Up" nonchalantly mixes syncopated and deliberately offbeat rhythms with Andean flutes (?) recorded here and there, proto-punk experiments with a sort of klezmer-calypso, country-blues guitars with '30s brass sections, creating a sort of patchanka fused with the most skewed electronics.
Solex's singing then, always and anyway feels "distant" as if coming from an old gramophone or even more from those early mono microphones with a terrible yet irresistible sound (remember the early DOORS?).

Solex does not worry about giving uniformity to the compositions because in fact THEY ARE NOT HERS. Our former saleswoman enjoyed "playing" with home recordings of concerts, records, tapes, and everything that is remotely related to sound, cutting, stitching, overlaying and reforming an original and recognizable "song formula", with an unprecedented taste, craftsmanship, and inventiveness that old W.Burroughs would have liked.

It's a pity then, as almost always happens with works of this kind, the formula dried up and, once the novelty effect was gone, it just cited itself not finding any other way to renew:
Which is a story already seen and reviewed...