Hunter Dragon

"Most songs I write get stuck in my head/It's 'cause I listen to them too much, I guess." With lyrics like these, it sounds as though Hunter Dragon's sole member, Joshua Hunter, spends a little too much time wearing playback headphones in his home studio. Some do-it-yourself discs get done to death this way, but Hunter has managed to turn self-obsession into madcap laughs with his debut full-length. What surely began as fourteen song sketches has been tweaked and mangled into a non-stop, 21-minute knot of disjointed pop, narcotized bleats and hallucinatory interludes that wrestle with each other like octopus tentacles. Top it off with ingrown loops and dub-ventilated ambience, and you've got a complex, perplexing and brilliant album of avant-folk that benefits, rather than suffers, from a few too many hours of being baked.