Three years on from his marvellous Design In Quick Rotation, the overall tone of Marco Mahler's highly recommended new record is more playful and self assured than his debut.
These are modern folk songs that delight in taking the listener into a looking glass world where nothing is quite what it seems.
"The world has become a mirror", he sings on Beautiful Monsters and seems to be saying Why not look at life this way? It makes sense or no sense just the same.
As if to prove this point, three songs in a row readily embrace the kind of surreal perspective that comes so naturally to kids. The first of these is a kind of wayward nursery rhyme called Jump The Fan which opens with the line "nip nap where's the bubble at" and, on first hearing at least , appears to be taking pleasure in its own absurdity.
But there is method in this apparent madness. Marco says "The whole bubble idea came from the economic bubbles that we keep going through and then I thought about how we all have our own personal bubbles that we keep creating then popping".
From this perspective the equally bizarre imagery of the other two tunes in the sequence (Don't Buy Cows If You Don't Have The Time & Pressure Drill Got Lost At Sea) has a perverse, even sinister, logic.
While it may be tempting here to draw an analogy with Lewis Carroll's Alice, Marco Mahler's parallel universe belongs more to Cyberspace than any fictional landscape.
Take, for example, his images from nature which seem to have been photo-shopped to produce an "automatic tree" (Soft As A Train) , blue trees and green clouds (Pressure Drill Got Lost At Sea) and "blue clouds in a blue sky" (Sample of a Sample).
The quirky album title comes from the equally quirkily titled song Cell Phone Antenna Trophy ("you stare at your laptop like it's a campfire"). His lyrics betray hints of a scepticism towards what he poetically dubs the "entertainment transport machines", but should not be construed as misanthropic or technophobic. The campfire is, after all, quite a comforting image - we gather around it for warmth, company and communication.
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The masterstroke of this record is a brilliant cover version of Richard 'Rabbit' Brown's James Alley Blues. This double-edged love song dates from 1927 but here takes on a highly contemporary and kindlier resonance. The opening lines, "Times are nothing like they used to be - there's too many people and they're all too hard to please", suggest that , in the face of progress, people are not always reliable sources of comfort and joy.
Actually, Brown's original version closes with a malevolent couplet - "Sometimes I think you're too sweet to die - And another time I think you ought to be buried alive". which Marco chooses to omit on the basis that these words sounded just too harsh. They certainly would have been out of place in a collection that is both relaxed and good humoured.
While it is possible, and rewarding, to draw deeper meanings from Marco's songs, he is essentially advocating a very simple philosophy, summed up in Sample Of A Sample: "as long as I've got my daydreams then I'm alright".
I'll buy some of that.
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