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***1/2 Quasi

R&B TRANSMOGRIFICATION

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Sam Coomes seems like the kind of guy who spent a lot of time at the arcade. Only, while the other kids were mowin' down space invaders, Coomes was busy cultivating a pathetically morbid romanticism and sucking up the sounds of the place -- cheesy primitive sampled stuff, the beautiful warm fakeness of all the blips and styrofoam jingles melting into a luscious roar.

The second album by his occasional band Quasi (a duo with his ex-wife, Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss) sounds like Phil Spector conducting a roomful of Ms. Pac Man machines programmed to play garage-damaged Beatles-esque pop songs in the key of wrist-slashing morose. It's mostly based around a booming faux boogie-woogie astroturf-tone piano (actually something called a Roxichord, an electric harpsichord someone cooked up in the mid '70s), with a bunch of lo-tech Casio gear and guitars on about a third of it. But mostly they're gorgeously sad, sad, sad songs about ghosts and death and the kind of advanced heart disorders that require hospitalization. That Weiss duets with Coomes on the saddest of them, "Ghost Dreaming" and "In the First Place," is nothing short of pathetic and wallowing -- sort of the opposite of Spector making the Crystals sing "He Hit Me (And It Felt like a Kiss)." But that's the remorseless, pitiful beauty of the thing.

-- Carly Carioli