The Ladybug Transistor – The Albermarle Sound (25th Anniversary Edition)

I’ve always been a sucker for an intricately crafted pop album, and for those digging in the bins of the late ‘90s it was often refreshing to find bands that were mining the baroque more than the bombast of what was in fashion. Alongside the (relatively) higher profile releases like Dusk At Cubist Castle and Her Wallpaper Reverie, The Ladybug Transistor released their own stained glass masterpiece in 1999, The Albermarle Sound. Recorded over a year in a a Victorian house in Flatbush that the band dubbed Marlborough Farms, the record was built like their brethren in the E6 — a carefully constructed diorama of sounds that found friends coming together like family, bringing instruments and perspectives to flesh out the album’s richly threaded tapestry.

While constructed in New York, the album embraces little of the city’s scuffed exterior, seeking instead to dig into the sea of cultures hidden away in outer borough beaches and bubbling away in the back of quiet corner bookshops. In fact, the most prominent cues feel far from home. A West Coast candor beams from the album. British whimsy blossoms in every corner. The Albermarle Sound constructs an ad-hoc orchestra in the living room and wrangles it onto a 16-Track with stunning results. One of the most intriguing aspects of the 25th Anniversary reissue is shedding a bit of light on how that year-long process worked out. As I explored a bit in a piece on the construction of “Oceans In The Hall,” the new reissue is packed with instrumentals, 4-track demos, and rough cuts that sketch out the band’s path to perfection. Rather than simply try to pack the expanded ranks full of one or two b-sides, Happy Happy Birthday To Me gives the album context and a peek behind the curtain. If your late ‘90s weren’t spent searching for the kind of candy-pop confections that lay in wait for the patient, then it’s certainly possible that this one has eluded you for years. This new edition might be just the time to catch up.

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