by Matt Watton (@brotinus)
Silicone Prairie is the solo outlet for Kansas City artist Ian Teeple (of Warm Bodies and the Natural Man Band). Their first full-length release My Life on the Silicone Prairie is accidentally a perfect record for the lockdown era. Recorded at his home on 4-track over the last couple years, it would have been a solitary effort regardless. The album synthesizes the vibe of alienation and disorientation so many of us are experiencing into an energetic and infectious batch of songs.
The eponymous track “Silicone Prairie” plays like a mission statement: tongue in cheek lyrics of exurban decline, with a jaunty melody of pounding drums and spacy synths, and some subtly virtuosic guitar work. Similarly, on the spastic “America,” Teeple sings of rotting fruit, the writing on the wall, and the US’ demise, ending in a vomit of tape machine grot. Check the accompanying music video, where the tune is the soundtrack to a grotesque goblin’s search for love (whether an American metaphor or a Lynchian fever dream, who can say?). This energy is well complemented by the earnestness of tracks like “Lay in the Flowers” and “Come Away”.
“Born into Trouble” and “Open Module” embody that bouncing, midwestern, Devo-influenced punk we know and love from bands like the Coneheads, Erik Nervous, or the Minneapolis Uranium Club. Silicone Prairie treads their own path, with hints of an older slanted pop sensibility, like Ray Davies combined with the whimsy of Zappa. The album is awash in a creative array of synths, culminating in the pensive instrumental “Song for Patrick Cowley,” apparently an homage to the electronic music pioneer, but sounding more like something off of side two of Bowie’s Low.
This variety makes for an album that is at once very contemporary and impossible to pin down - and impossible to stop listening to. The quasi-mystical album art (also Teeple’s work) invites us into the haunting world of the Silicone Prairie. You’re very likely to be already living in this world and so this record provides the perfect soundtrack to the unease of modern life.