'Alphabet Soup' is out now! The next in a long line of concept albums produced by My Robot Unicorn, 'Alphabet Soup' is, once again, limited to 100 intricate hand made copies which inside addresses notions of lyricism, love, integrity and musical intent over 27 songs recorded using only voice and a $12 toy keyboard from 1992. Here's what the reviews are saying:
My Robot Unicorn- Alphabet Soup
MARY CHRISTA O'KEEFE / [email protected]
Oh, that Marshall Watson, always with the adorableness! The winsome animating spirit behind My Robot Unicorn has taken time out of his busy schedule of mounting musicals and such to give us another one of his sprightly song-stuffed discs. Alphabet Soup, as you may suspect, has a trope: there are 26 tracks, one for each letter in the tradition of “A is for ... “, plus an amazing bonus queer anthem on the closing track. The record owes much of its charm to the lowest of lo-fi production on champagne ambition, so Fleetwood Mac-scaled intentions are delivered on the twee-est of pop instruments: shitty synths, dinky piano, xylophone, tambourine and maybe some handclaps and pre-vocal snorts and murmurs. Then there’s Watson, his skeletal, urgent voice whisper-chanting impressionistic dispatches from the frontlines of the sexuality wars over bedroom dance music informed by hip-hop, disco, Morrissey and utopian orchestral pop—and fabulosity ensues, or at least the kind of frisky subversive mischief peddled by the like of the Magnetic Fields.
And there are only 10 copies left of My Robot Unicorn's first album, 'Living on the Edge of a Cliff' which Vue Weekly reviewed back in 2007...
My Robot Unicorn- Living on the Edge of a Cliff
MARY CHRISTA O’KEEFE / [email protected]
Realized and recorded in a week around Valentine’s Day, Living on the Edge of a Cliff debuts the playful (or perhaps play-fey) dink-pop of My Robot Unicorn, aka unfairly talented local writer/musician Marshall Watson. (“Dink-pop?†“You know, when they make the music thinking about this really huge, orchestra-scaled pop vision of their sound, but actually make the music with this tiny skeleton of instruments on home equipment with their shitty little toy piano or something going ‘dink-dink-dink’.†“Oh. Okay.â€)
The Herculean title conveys both Watson’s grandiosity of ambition and the ambiguously cavalier nature of his delivery, and also portends the chatty (sometimes catty) makeshift urban fables within. Ranging from little-baby-furry-mammal-kinda-cute to touchingly aching to wittily petulant, Cliff is much more like a series of cool comic strips than any kind of cinema, powered by the pinwheel sparkle of acoustic guitar, banjo, harmonica, tambourine, the dink-dink-dink of glockenspiel alongside Watson’s engagingly flawed voice. Uptempo songs stagger around like a tipsy monkey wielding a music box, while morose ditties suggest a lighter-hearted Morrissey coming home alone to a coldwater flat he shares with Squeeze.
The “dink†motif continues to the final track, when Watson sings a savage eff-off, words tumbling out with the wounded laceration of heartbreak/pridebreak: “you sucked in bed it’s true / you’re a boy too / we have the same parts / you should have known what to do’ before triumphantly summing up with, “your penis is small and you can’t cook at all.†Ouch.