Michael Lindner Cocktail Napkin There’s something uncanny, in the Freudian sense, about Michael Lindner’s album. All of the elements that go to make up his music are conventional to the point of being retro. There’s nothing particularly radical about his playing techniques, he rarely uses obvious effects or processing, he doesn’t experiment with feedback or noise. And yet Cocktail Napkin is deeply, profoundly weird. It’s the aural equivalent of a David Lynch movie. The strangeness is particularly apparent on the four covers here. Lindner has tracked down some of the creepiest songs of the ’50s and ’60s, most notably Jody Reynolds’ ‘Endless Sleep’, and arranged them with a brutal minimalism that makes the Flying Lizards (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHs-6xnMEdE) sound like ELO. Together, his one-note bass lines, distant vocals, surf guitar washes and unprovoked war on hi-hats add up to something that verges on the disturbing. Sam Inglis Sound on Sound magazine dec 2007 http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec07/articles/playback_1207.htm www.alleyonemusic.com