Aquatint

The inspired artistic drive that keeps Testbild! creating unusual, intriguing, electronic art pop discs continues with Aquatint, probably their most ambitious to date. The water theme throughout the album artwork gets echoed with the opening track -- consisting of little more than the sound of rushing fluids -- which makes the easygoing gentility of "Lighthouse Glow" a fine contrast as the album's first song, as such. The album's 20 songs touch on everything from the quietest of keyboard pieces to sweetly sung confections that shows the group's Beach Boys love will never die to further collages of natural sounds and other elements, all within the overarching context of both the general water theme and a short film and story included with the album. In a nice touch, the concluding song, "My Brother the Submariner," is actually an outside songwriting contribution from a simpatico source, Matt Jones of the Hepburns.