TIGER BEAT: Martin Tielli’s We Never Suspected He Was the Poppy Salesman.

Oh, well, yeah.

This album opens with a fantastic song that reminds me of nothing so much as Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains. It keeps going in this same pretty, broken-open vein, and while the first half of the album is mostly stronger than the second, there’s a song somewhere in the second half with imagery that managed to remind me of both the Iliad and Kathy Shaidle’s “The Missionary Performs an Exorcism.” In sound, it’s interestingly Cat Power-ish: lyrics and vocals reminiscent of her earlier albums, mostly Dear Sir, but with a poppy-prettiness level closer to her more recent and more popular album Free.

There’s something with this guy. I said before that his Operation Infinite Joy is flawed, and yet I can’t stop playing it!, and both of those things are still true. WNSHWTPS is more consistent, less self-doubting or jaggedly veering, and definitely the best things on it are better than even the best things on OIJ. You should go find this thing.

And as my pusher noted, it’s available here for “$15.00 Canadian! ZOMG cheap!”