Search - Doktor Kosmos :: Cocktail

Despite its sounds--the completely synthetic blips and bleeps of cheesy Kraftwerk wannabes--the debut English-language release by Sweden's Doktor Kosmos is in essence a folk record. Just as old-time guitar pickers copped stock melodies, lyrics, and chord progressions, expressing themselves through adaptation, the good Doktor uses the generic, public domain accompaniments of the electronic age. With pushbutton convenience, Kosmos (one-time keyboardist for Stockholm's Komeda) conjures the preset beats and rhythms of commercial synths on which he sings his own new songs. For those who demand blood and guts songwriting, the plastic ditties on Cocktail will sound frustratingly shallow and simplistic. That anyone with a $100 Casio and a few fingers is more than halfway toward replicating Doktor Kosmos' sound certainly puts his music in suspicion. Yet it's hard to label Kosmos a charlatan, if only because his music can make the listener laugh out loud. There's a conceptual brilliance at work in his one-touch minimalism, both parodying and emulating early techno/synth-pop, whenever, like an ineffectual, overintellectual Eurotrash noodler (think Saturday Night Live's Mike Myers as Dieter), he mechanically deadpans the ever-concise lyrics to "Elevator Bossa": "A boy and a girl/Fell in love in the elevator/Two months later/He hate her." Then, with the Ping-Pong ball driven "L.S.A.T.T. (Lazy Sunday Afternoon Table-Tennis)" and "No One at Home," which constructs a '90s cosmopolitan rag around unanswered telephone rings, doorbells and knocks, Kosmos gets really subversive. He offers his machine-age laziness as avant garde composition, and with a barely hidden snicker, juxtaposes artiness with frivolity and cold digital complexity with cocktail stupidity. Where Berlin meets Miami Beach, Bauhaus meets Art Deco, and ambient techno DJ'ing meets organ grinder monkeybusiness, Doktor Kosmos has produced a guilty pleasure worthy of indulgence. --Roni Sarig