If you have any inclination to acquire Memories of Björn Bolssen – perhaps you liked the first EP, I don't know – I would strongly recommend that you don't. You'd probably have just as much fun waving a magnet over your computer's innards as listening to to this cobbled mess all the way through. There frankly isn't anything about this record that sounds polished, except perhaps the production: that, at least, was not the work of some overly ambitious high school kids in their basement; but the rest of this album, sadly, sounds like it might well be.

For starters, the dissonance is overwhelming. This isn't the good dissonance that one might expect from the truly avant-garde (late-era John Coltrane springs to mind) or a mathcore-grindcore group like The Dillinger Escape Plan. Tupolev, rather, have taken very traditional melodies of the type Ólafur Arnalds records and simply moved some notes up or down a few semi-tones. The result is that these passages, instead of being new or edgy, sound pretentious and forced. The inescapable piano is not compelling, it's laboured, and the addition of static-filled samples and tedious 3-note basslines makes for a listening experience more wtf than ftw.

On the occasions when drums are present, the grooves are tight and showcase a player who knows what he is doing. Were they in a vacuum, this would be fine, but in this case the groove works to the album's detriment. The drums sound out of place, even when they match the lead parts. They are so crisp and bright and together that they beg for leads that are just as tight, and the weak, dissonant piano melodies and electronic drone-samples feel like incursions from another record. Perhaps if, instead of all the feathery rod play on the cymbals, there were some darker tones from the toms to enhance those drones and diminished chords, the percussion would fit. There is no evidence to suggest, though, that there are even toms on the drumkit.

One thing I noticed upon later listens that escaped me at first is how dead this album sounds. Technique aside, I don't get the impression that any of the people on this album have any personal investment in it. You can hear soul when people play; it triggers a sort of empathic connection in us that we can't control, and I simply don't feel anything for this collection of sounds. Every draw of the cellist's bow and every chord on the piano sounds like a stroke from a player who has not quite understood their music and is still squinting at the part in front of them trying to figure out fingerings and such.

I find it interesting that a group that cites John Coltrane as an influence on their MySpace page would pay so little attention to the way that man actually wrote music. There is a bit of a jazz flare to this record, but its sluggish tempo and lack of interesting ideas relegate the potential in that flare to mere pretention. John Coltrane was a musical genius who built dissonance out of competing but complementary melodies. He rewrote Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker's book on jazz soloing with blistering speed and a flourish of augmented chord arpeggios. Tupolev's bare bones minimalism and banal lead voices show no hint of awareness to that foundation. There is no doubt that as instrumentalists, the members of Tupolev are very capable - the piano and drums in particular stand out as being played by musicians instead of just players. Unfortunately, the song-writing is beyond mediocre, and a record without songs isn't much of a record at all.

-Lee Stablein