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Album Reviews
Album Review: Merka – Make & Do (Fat! Records)
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 10 November 2008
It’s one of the great clichés of the music business that the second album is always the hardest. Artists get carried away, lose sight of their roots, or even where they thought they were going. If this is the case, then this could be the absolute stereotypical second album. For the first few tracks, it sounds like Merka is parading his new sampler patch to the world, sticking bleeps and breaks together with the weakest of housey superglue. I know it’s cool to have retro-Nintendo appeal nowadays, but this ends up sounding like a glitchy SNES with a generic soul cartridge slammed in. When it’s kept simple, it works a lot better, as on ‘DYAF’, an almost Fourtet-esque offering of chilled electronica with a pulse. The rest of the time, the result is confused, if not a little quirky, and the whole album seems to be all over the place. There are decent beats and hooks in here somewhere, but Merka seems to have forgotten the prominence with which these elements should be treated in this kind of music. He seems to be too preoccupied with the art of anticipation, which can be exhilarating when executed well, but when the end product is just another Moloko throwback pseudo-soul loop it all gets a little tedious. A fresh and original sound caused his debut, ‘Beserka’, to make waves in 2007, but I can’t decide whether Merka has tried to take this originality too far, or has just stagnated altogether and is just trying not to drown. ME
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