Arts And Crafts [CD]

The Black Neon's debut album, Arts and Crafts, is a strong, sometimes quite exciting release that successfully blends sounds and styles and comes out sounding unique. Heavily influenced by the progressive and electronic sounds coming out of Germany in the '70s (Can, Kraftwerk, Neu!), the Black Neon also rope in elements of space rock, indie pop, indie techno, and straight-ahead rock. Welding hooky pop tunes onto repetitive, almost avant-garde structures is nothing new, but the man behind the Black Neon, Steve Webster, does it with style and a nearly perfect sense of arrangement.