Olivia Tremor Control

Part of the loose coalition of neo-psychedelic bands known as the Elephant 6 Collective, Olivia Tremor Control made its full-length debut with Music From the Unrealized Film Script -- "Dusk at Cubist Castle," a sprawling 27-track disc that reveals some great pop instincts -- and a serious need for editing. The main references throughout are Revolver-era Beatles, Smile-era Beach Boys, and various other classic-rock signposts roughened up by lo-fi production and a loose, informal playing style. The record's centerpiece, the 10-track suite "Green Typewriters," displays OTC's strengths and weaknesses: Promising musical ideas emerge -- a pretty harmony here, an explosive riff there -- but soon get replaced by some noisy "experiment." Still, Cubist Castle is the group's most cohesive recording, revealing a band clearly capable of creating solid retro-pop songs.
,br> Its followup, Black Foliage: Animation Music, Vol. One, is another 27-track opus with heavy concep-tual strains. This time, higher fidelity and production values turn the Beatles/Beach Boys references into more overt imitation. German tape-collagers Faust also loom large in the recurring musique concrete of five "animation" tracks, which feature instrumental themes and bits cobbled together from the title track and other sources. Here again, though, an admirable sense of playful experimentation gets clouded by the group's lack of focus or restraint.

A posthumous compilation, Singles and Beyond, collects a pair of early EPs as well as singles and compilation tracks. While the sound and vision of later inclusions are mostly familiar from the group's two studio albums, recordings from 1992–93 (released originally on the California Demise EP and as a sin-gle from the same era) reveal an unpolished, lo-fi fuzz-rock approach that manages to be retro and catchy without drawing too obviously on the band's influences. Here, sounding more like the Tall Dwarfs or fellow Elelphant Six act Neutral Milk Hotel, OTC still brims with the promise it never quite attained. (RONI SARIG)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide