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Alan Wilkis – Snuggle Up to Nail Down
From Pink and Purple EP [Buy] [CD Baby]

Last year we reviewed Alan Wilkis‘ slightly eccentric début album Babies Dream Big, and adored its big-tent mix of pop stylings. In 2009 the Brooklyn-based musician and producer is back with an EP entitled Pink and Purple, a deep dive into the synthesised swamp of Reagan-era soundscapes and electrolysed beats.

Wilkis always sounds like he’s having a great amount of fun, whether its dressing up as Rick James backed by the Nintendo Sisters on Snuggle Up to Nail Down (complete with ridiculous-but-appropriate autotuned vocals), or filtering percussion through a DeLorean’s flux capacitor on the EP’s title track.

On N.I.C.E., Wilkis’ white-boy disco fiend is out on the town looking for his material girl, and everything on the scene is pitch-perfect: the swirling synth pads, the rap outro and “Ooh boy, show me whatcha got” female BVs. You could argue that it’s pastiche, but these days, pastiche counts as modernism. And with music as wilfully wrought as this, Wilkis takes it to another level.

Perhaps Wilkis’ choice of 80s schtick sounds a little insincere on the sub-bossa ballad Time Machine, but when Pink and Purple focuses on filling the dancefloor, the EP works very very nicely indeed, and comes across as a more coherent work than his 2008 album. Check it out on Wilkis’ site, or listen on MySpace.