Buzzin Electronic Music

Javelin – Javelin – album review

Javelin's self-titled EP

Cousins Tom Van Buskirk and George Langford are Javelin. They make their music using numerous samples from barely traceable records, and perform live by transmitting their music to FM, a signal then picked up by various boomboxes at their shows.

Sound like a gimmick? Well it’s not. The home-made approach is like recycling for the music scene, or like those artists that occasionally get bigged up because they make all their sculptures out of rubbish (“What a marvellous idea!”). Javelin’s music is like an oral summary of a section of their record collection.

It’s almost hard to describe Javelin without making them coming across like another band with their own gimmick like a tap dancing rhythm section or 27 members (Tilly and the Wall and The Polyphonic Spree respectively), but this stuff sounds genuine.

For starters, there’s no real singing over it, so you can tell the producers have got lost in the sounds and rhythms they are compiling and splicing with keyboards, drums and whatever other instruments may be lying around.

Secondly the tracks themselves are inventive without being deliberately difficult. The riffs fade in and out, are altered and return; the rhythms make you want to dance; the . The overall sound is like hearing distant party music which you don’t quite recognise.

And it’s good fun. At no point do you think there is a contrived point to be made or a hankering for an NME ‘look how these guys make music!’ exclusive. It’s just two cousins having fun with the music they find.
The opening ‘Lindsay Brohan’ and ‘Soda Popinski’ are, along with ‘TWYCE’, the standout tracks on the self-titled EP. ‘Lindsay Brohan’’s basic keyboards and popping rhythms making it sound like a 90s German kids party tune. ‘Soda Popinski’ is like an symphony for Nintendo sounds, and apparently contains lyrics such as “This is a song for Soda Popinski / My spirit animal would be Klaus Kinski”, making it a relief they are too distorted to hear.

The duo currently live in New York and will soon be playing shows across the US with The XX, The Very Best, Lucky Dragons and Yeasayer. The duo has, in the past played venues as diverse as the children’s branch of the Olneyville Public Library (RI), to the Museum of Modern Art (NY).

Here’s Javelin’s MySpace page.