*** Snowpony

THE SLOW-MOTION WORLD OF SNOWPONY

(Radioactive)

Katharine Gifford is probably best known as Stereolab's former keyboardist, but she seems to have formed her aesthetic more in her tenure in Moonshake before hooking up with former My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe as Snowpony. Gifford sings all the songs on Slow-Motion World in the same sinister, restrained murmur -- she's got a very narrow vocal range, but she makes what she can of it -- and backs them with multi-layered, atonally blurting samples held together by the crackle of live drums and Googe's driller-killer bass. Gifford likes to play around with nasty symbolism, and though she gets off a few great lines ("It's not quite what you wanted, but that's all you're going to get," she snaps), the sideways references to heroin and eroticized violence can reach the "yeah, whatever" point after a while, especially when she delivers them all in the same lotus eater's moan.

Her real specialty, though, is arrangement. The mix is constantly turning up some new shotgun blossom of a detail -- a French horn that goes with the groove, a spray of orchestral noise that doesn't, a faraway whistle that comes out of nowhere, a guitar treated so heavily that it becomes nothing more than a crackling texture. On stage, the band can be a little too dependent on DATs, but on this album, the sound is bracing.

-- Douglas Wolk