Oulipo

The cover of Raleigh band Oulipo’s debut EP, That Is What I Said (And I Dove Into The Water), depicts a man, craning his neck back as an octopus wraps its tentacles over and around his face. It’s hard to tell how complicit the man is, or if the image is meant to elicit laughs or shudders. In either case, it’s captivating.

The octopus in the photo functions much like Oulipo’s music, which seems to extend itself in several directions at once, touching corners of exuberant, layered pop, driving dance music and exploratory improvisation. The appeal isn’t in the strangeness of an octopus on a man’s face, but in the connection between man and mollusk, between an idea and its execution.

Though there are immediate and obvious touchstones—particularly, the joyful noise of Animal Collective and its related solo projects—primary songwriter Ryan Trauley leads a quintet which seems not to have defined its own boundaries quite yet. The EP, released on cassette by local label DiggUp Tapes, is an exercise in abstract pop that highlights this group’s overgrowth of ideas. “Ten Gallon Shoes” moves from cavernous, plunking percussion to layers of excitable vocals (not unlike the funhouse pop of Man Man) over a film-score synth-drone, and then into a Panda Bear-like choir of synthetic vocal multiplicity. It ends as spare, fragile folk. The song isn’t exactly unified in its composition, but the transitions between pieces move seamlessly, the way a good DJ shifts from one song to the next.

Like the amorphous soundscapes that form That Is What I Said, Oulipo’s strength is in its ability to conglomerate its many ideas into a pleasing whole. The future likely holds greater results for the band, but honestly, there’s plenty to keep us interested right now. —Bryan Reed