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Elliot Carlson Boteros Parasite: A Love Story
Styles. Categories. Genres. Sub genres. Man, it gets dicey placing a type of music in its appropriate box, especially when confronted with someone who has a unique personality and approach to music. That's what's up with Eliot Carlson Botero and his new CD Parasite: A Love Story. The best I can come up with is this: his music is the traffic circle where the singer songwriter with a guitar and some hip hop records meets post-grunge rock and electronica spirits and they collide. Then drive on. If you want to hear an original interesting voice get this CD. If you're young, like 14 or 15 years old this is a guy you can really claim as your own. I'm an old head but I remember what it was like (artists and groups, if you're open-minded and still developing, will keep finding you and making the soundtrack of your life). Thank you and goodnight.
 Oh, what? You want more? Specifics? Okay. First let me tell you what it isn't. Botero doesn't do what an A&R record executive told me at a music conference many years ago. He is not "throwing different types of songs at us (that is, A&R men) and hoping that something sticks on." Botero clearly has his own thing and it's developed quite nicely, and, best of all, shows the potential to develop more. He is a singer songwriter, a bard with a guitar; he is also someone for whom technology is not just a tool, but cool and fun. Besides drum loops and synthesizer licks there are various electronic percussion sounds, various "bloops" and "bleeps" that dance playfully on the tracks. The backing and, for lack of a better term, augmenting vocals are sometimes processed, nasal whispered. He had fun making this record and it shows. The opening track "Love Hurts" gives the old Negativeland treatment to George Bush.
The next two songs "Francis and Matilda" and "Home Sweet Home" are dense, bluesy rockers that have a nasty edge that comes from a hand clap heavy beat and slightly distorted overdriven voices and guitar on the former, and the straight up live band with Botero's slide guitar, Darren Lipper's bass and Gideon Grossman's drums on the latter. Any of you readers ever heard of Black Oak Arkansas? How about Beck? This song is kinda like that, but also smart and chock-full of sass. Then he flips the script with the Euro electronica dance parody "Je t'aime Felix"and the funky, downtempo "Starless Lounge," featuring sexycool Brazilian rap by Joao Joya. Other cuts use a mix of the above; that is, electronic touches with guitar rock.
Still other types of music morph out of electro indie rock style. "Lullaby" starts as a psychedelic folk song and then becomes a samba pop song. "Game Over" is a languid hip hop infused R&B-meets-guitar rock song. It features a vocal of somebody's "Chop Chop" features western country guitar that invokes wide open spaces like the music of Chris Isak or surf. The beat is a techno type groove with mechanical hand claps. The song breaks down to a hyper tango with super fast claps as he sings "Sweet Adeline, please be mine/ I'll never let you go/ Chop chop." "Plastic Bag Tree". The beat is comprised of various bleeps, hits, and drums by Grossman (dig the brush work). He colors this song with many unexpected elements: keyboard-created horn hits, atmospheric electric guitars, distorted and clear background vocals. Like many of the songs here, there are surprising tricks like deviating from and augmenting the typical verse-chorus-verse structure with bridges, and bridges to extended verses, and bridges to bridges.
The songs all have similarities but it's the differences and the quality of the arranging and writing that make this CD a standout. It deserves and hold up under repeated listenings. Each song could receive one of my patented, wordy essay-reviews. They have that much meat and that much variety. This shows that Elliot Botero picked up on the true punk ethos - not dumb anger or glorifying the stupid for fear of being pretentious, but the old school punk thang of anything goes.
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