There was a brief period in the 1970s where the hot trend in music was the singer/ songwriter. During this period, any man or woman with long hair and a guitar could get a record deal, as long as your songs explored "sensitive" themes popular with the baby boomers who'd just come of age. This is how we explain the existence of records by Jim Croce, Rita Coolidge, and Jackson Browne. Their forefather was, of course, Bob Dylan, who'd shown the world that you didn't need anything fancy to make great records; all you needed was ideas. The thing was, Dylan was a genius and most of those other chumps were idiots. And this is why so much of that music is utter crap. In any case, during the singer/ songwriter period, songs were what counted. Nobody gave a damn about production; as long as you could hear the precious words, everyone was happy.

Then disco happened. And punk, too, I guess. But punk was still hung up on lyrical content, and what you said (or at least your attitude) was often more important than how you said it. Disco, on the other hand, only needed to signify when pumping through the state- of- the- art sound system at Studio 54. The major labels took great care to ensure that records by bands like Chic and KC and the Sunshine Band sounded fucking good. True, a lot of disco beats are dated, and an abundance of strings smothered many a tune, but you could always make out the bass, drums and guitar very clearly in the best disco records. The design and arrangement of sound was a priority.

And so it is with the Peace Orchestra. This Peter Kruder (of Kruder and Dorfmeister) project is design at its finest-- spacious, full production of downtempo beats that demand to be played at top volume through a fine stereo. Every snare hit is laid as carefully as if it were a jewel, and nothing's extraneous. The mood here is chill- room dubby, with drug- weary beats and wavering orchestral samples swirling through the airy mix. Some of this reminds me of Board of Canada, but it's much more crisp and meticulous in that way only producers of Germanic extraction seem to understand. The drums are what make this record special; inspired by the use of the ride cymbal in jazz, there's a warm metallic sheen to these tracks, like they're coated in some kind of insulating foil. A beautiful noise that Neil Diamond couldn't begin to understand.

-Mark Richard-San