Sportsday Megaphone - 'So Many Colours So Little Time' (Sunday Best) Released 29/09/08

‘So Many Colours / So Little Time’ is best described as the tentatively anticipated debut album by Hugh Frost aka Sportsday Megaphone. Tentative because what started out as a series of album covers for imaginary bands has swiftly morphed into an example of life imitating art and its time to see if the whispered praise lives up to the hype.

DIY crafted bedroom electronica has come a long way in the past five years, the trouble being that as home technology progresses and becomes more accessible, practitioners become more proficient, and the splintered off centre DIY sound can instead resemble nothing more than IKEA flat-pack where anyone with an alan key can join the club. So it’s rather refreshing to hear Frost’s Casio drenched Pac-man pop in all its undiluted glory. At times ‘So Many Colours / So Little Time’ threatens turning into a pre-arranged Facebook flash-mob; the location, Currys, the objective, to simultaneously press as many demo buttons as humanly possible, the potential risk, injury from a nose-bleed induced seizure. But while the likes of ‘Song For The Owls’, ‘Adventures After Hours’, What’s There To Be Afraid Of?’ and ‘Bikini Atol’ briefly sound like an epileptic trapped in a Sega Mega Drive there is an alluring exotic feel to the countless blips, bleeps and beats that incessantly attack the eardrums and far from Game Over there’s always a 1-Up on offer.

As the album progresses so does the appeal and a bubble bursting insolent honesty emerges through ‘For Better For Worse’, ‘I Think Its Love’, ‘LA’ and ‘YO YO Loveboats!’ revealing an entrenched punk ethic and despite the potential kaleidoscopic overdose, much more than a fly by night button pushing flash in the pan. Although at times you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise as reality slowly melts away into a virtual world of someone else’s design.

But it’s the unpolished diamond building blocks of ‘Meet Me In The Middle’, ‘Carrying The Years’ (lyrics and vocals by Rebekka Raa of Stricken City), ‘Black Plastic’ and in particular the electro stash bag dipping ‘Less & Less’ that rescue an album in danger of drowning in its own imaginative determination. That said as ‘Body Fat’ brings the album to a close, the bright lights of the real world seem a little brighter, the noise a little realer and the recent 45 minute trashed voyage of discovery a little vaguer.