**1/2 Stephen Prina

PUSH COMES TO LOVE

(Drag City)

An LA conceptual artist and a member of the current Red Krayola line-up, Stephen Prina spends most of his solo debut playing intriguing word games. "Cums for, cums to/That's where he came/My modest, one-room home/He pushed it in/And then he pulled it ouch," he sings on "Cums for Shove," the disc's opening track. It's a punning narrative fragment that might be about a rape or just an extremely detached sexual encounter, and its peculiarity is heightened by Prina's cold, lounge-singer vocals and Teletubby synths. This chilling contrast between the sterile tone of the vocals and music and the violently sensual content of the lyrics is a specialty Prina shares with Krayola's Mayo Thompson and Gastr del Sol's David Grubbs, though he doesn't have either's penchant for art-rock, avant-noise, and jazz flourishes. Instead, despite backing here by Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke, he relies mostly on peppy trumpets and cheesy keyboard tones.

It's also worth noting that the lyrics Prina intones with such hermetic panache are mostly the work of other people: LA splatter-pop novelist Dennis Cooper, poet Amy Gerstler, New York fiction writer Lynne Tillman. Still, Push Comes to Love is a fascinating example of what pop music might sound like if Brian Eno and Marcel Duchamp were muses more popular than the Beatles.

-- Alec Hanley Bemis