Wallpaper
T. Rex EP
Eenie Meenie Records
By Doug Wallen
From Panther to YACHT, these days the West Coast is exploding with one-named one-man-bands getting as much mileage as they can out of bedroom-recorded electro-funk silliness. Each act has had moments of sublimity but also plenty of dull stretches, and if Wallpaper – a.k.a. Eric Frederic – escapes that trap, it’s only because his hotly tipped new record has just five brief and brisk songs.
The T. Rex in the title isn’t a nod to Marc Bolan’s famed glam band, but to the song of the same name, on which a vocodered Frederic brags, “Then I go big on the weekends / I go T. Rex.” Amid lots of shimmer and sparkle in just under two and a half minutes, it’s deliriously catchy, thanks in part to a deep-voiced radio personality intoning funny lines about getting alcohol in his “vein-y vein veins.”
Yep, this is ripe musical caricature, part parody and part homage. It comes in the sweaty, sex-obsessed tradition of P. Funk, Beck’s Midnite Vultures and ringtone rap. “Evrytm We Do It” has the biggest bedroom eyes of the batch, and “Text Me Yr Love” uses cool synths and mood-setting snaps to underscore Frederic’s beloved vocoder and R&B-style sentiments: “Text me your love so I know it’s true.” It sounds dumb on paper, but Frederic happens to be a gifted mimic of genres, not to mention an endearing producer (check out his remix of Jamie Lidell’s “Little Bit of Feel Good” on his Myspace page).
“So Hot” follows the same formula without diversion, mentioning “a Wall Street wife” and the requisite bling, while the closing “The Remix” has the easiest punch line here: “This is the remix / This is your ringtone.”
The lesson? Nightlife is a joke, and so is America’s hip-hop-obsessed materialism, where parody and earnestness blend together into something new altogether. Wallpaper does the same, and if it’s been done before, at least Frederic plays his hand as quickly and infectiously as possible.
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