The Soft Pink Truth, "Why Pay More?"

Eight years can be a lifetime in music (the entire Beatles career spanned eight years, for example). In 2007 the first track from this album showed up, "Party Pills," and it seemed as if the forthcoming Soft Pink Truth album was bound to be a killer. Eight years later the full-length has finally surfaced, and, well, it sure as hell is.

self-released (bandcamp)

Perhaps the concept wasn't fully formulated in 2007, but at some point long ago, Drew Daniel was assembling music primarily around YouTube samples, only to finish in the last month and unleash this collection without much warning. Eight songs are now available in a pay-what-you-want model, direct from Daniel's bandcamp site for Soft Pink Truth. Ironically, perhaps, the concept perfectly matches with the title bestowed on the project long before the explosion of bandcamp.

Aesthetically, the album is more in line with Daniel's debut LP as Soft Pink Truth, Do You Party? in a few major ways. Primarily, it is original in its unoriginality: while these songs are built from samples, the tunes are original compositions and not a set of indie punk or death metal covers. I don't feel like I'm somehow missing out because I'm not intimately familiar with an original version of a Venom or Angry Samoans song. Perhaps due to this aspect (since it is a collection of non-covers) Why Pay More? is pretty much completely void of sung vocals. It makes the album far more sincere and much less of a gimmick as a whole. (And I don't have to endure over-processed vocals growling of death, deviance, and damnation.)

Additionally, it is much dancier than Why Do the Heathen Rage? and Do You Want New Wave?, and that's a good thing. While I have been a long admirer or Drew Daniel's talent as a composer both in solo work and in Matmos, he absolutely shines working within the confines of a dance format. Absolute highlights for me include the upbeat "I Love Your Ass" (which opens up almost sounding like an homage to G-Force era Greater Than One), the deep grooves of album opener, "Are You Looking?," and the disco of closer "Fire Island of the Mind."

Why Pay More? is a much more enjoyable listen start to finish and certainly will be getting far more mileage than the previous two full-lengths. As an added bonus, the each downloaded MP3 files from bandcamp comes embedded with an individual image to go along with that tune. Hopefully the next collection will be of industrial covers or at least somehow, we will finally get to hear a definitive studio version of SPT's "The Anal Staircase," but for now Why Pay More? is a much appreciated surprise gift from Mr. Daniel.