OOFJ, Acute Feast (Ring the Alarm/Fake Diamond Records)
The closest thing I can think of to this L.A. electronic duo is Golden Filter, mostly due to singer Katherine Mills-Rymer’s half-asleep waifishness. She’s even more lost-sounding than Penelope Trappes, a sort of cartoon version of Asteroids Galaxy Tour — you get the idea, a tech-age Betty Boop, but really sleepy. This project came about after Mills-Rymer and Danish laptop-wizard Jenno Bjørnkjær met in New York while he was soundtracking Melancholia, the second film in Lars Von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy” (which ended with Nymphomaniac). Underneath the somnambulist vocals, Bjørnkjær lays careful foundations made of such things as glitchy dubstep (“You’re Always Good”); brackish sea-turtle symphonics (“I Forgive You”) and world-class subatomic-trance/IDM (the outstanding “Snakehips”). This certainly wasn’t done over a few coffees; obviously a lot of thought went into the layering of these sounds, and the only effects I heard on Mills-Rymer’s voice were short periods of deep reverb. I could have done without the nasty electro of “Don’t Look,” but it does fit and sports a pretty mean little hook. Percussion isn’t a staple here; it’s a headphone record, a really superb one. A+ — Eric W. Saeger