The neighborhood record store offers a necessary crutch-- a place to run with terminally unlistenable discs which one can trade in for something more worthy of aural ingestion. But what about all the used discs that you know in the bottom of your heart will never be sold? The bottomless $1.99 bins would surely be an intimidating reminder of cash spent lost to pimply-faced adolescents peddling Phatfunk discs. What to do with these materially valueless artifacts?

If you're Amsterdam record shop owner Elizabeth Esselink, you go through the racks, sample the best bits, and wage war with the Hitmeister. As Solex, Esselink assembles junk-pop symphonies from unwanted discs and lays distinctive Casio lines and sultry stream-of-consciousness storylines on top. But this is no dead-end process, as one might expect-- Pick Up is the second long-player of Esselink's distinctively bouncy, nonsensical songwriting, and takes several steps forward from her intriguing debut, Solex vs. the Hitmeister.

Esselink's accomplished sampler orchestrations are more self-assured this time around. The title track opens with a muted trumpet and a rapidly accelerating beat before blossoming into a sing-songy assemblage of portentous horn punctuations and guitar strummage. She displays a chaotic command of rhythm in propelling her pieces forward-– every musical snatch follows its own platonic beat but somehow results in an illogically swinging lilt. By the end of "Randy Costanza," for example, Esselink has managed to cram two repeating string motifs alongside a two-looped guitar chord structure, and throw a polyrhythmic shuffle in for good measure. The intrinsic tempos of each vie against the rest for cadenced domination, but the result is harmonious flow. It shouldn't work, but it does.

Esselink's vocals lend cohesion to the songs, and her lyrics give you something else to wrap your head around when following the musical free-association becomes too much. With song titles like "That's What You Get with People like That on Cruises like These...", "Another Tune Like 'Not Fade Away'," and "That'll Be $22.95," rest assured that her lyrical muse is as eccentric and far-reaching as her musical one.

Pick Up is hearty pop fun for the detritus age. Esselink's productions are so characteristic, however, that it's difficult not to feel bogged down by the musical cut-and-paste formulae. And though she enlisted some friends to flesh out assorted tracks with original instrumental contributions, one could hardly tell. Nevertheless, Pick Up is a strong developmental achievement in the right direction for Solex, and should stand as inspiration for used record store owners the world over.

-S. Murray